Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused major anger after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of females by taking off their garments.
Multiple instances have surfaced where the system has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, except for an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw nudification software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the potential" of people accessing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium features—which answers X users' queries when they reference it in a post.
It is often used to give commentary or additional context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can alter an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Controversy and Rules
The system has been faulted for permitting users to create images and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the production and spread of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "depicting images of people in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they become aware of it.
