Elon Musk's social media network X has caused major backlash after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of women by taking off their clothing.
Multiple instances have been seen where the technology has been used to virtually strip female subjects to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to ban nudification tools. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such technology would "receive a jail term and significant penalties".
"The platform could prevent these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to offer reactions or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an posted picture through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to create images and clips with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of generating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting likenesses of individuals in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they are notified of it.
