Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked widespread outrage after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of females by stripping their clothing.
Numerous cases have surfaced where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to questions, other than an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being proposed to prohibit nudification technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such technology would "face a jail term and substantial penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the potential" of people viewing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is often used to offer reactions or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can alter an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to generate images and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate content of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the production and sharing of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "portraying likenesses of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or share deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to remove it promptly when they are notified of it.
