Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked widespread anger after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of females by taking off their attire.
Numerous examples have been seen where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in sexualized situations.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw nudification software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional features—which responds to X users' queries when they mention it in a post.
It is commonly used to give commentary or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been condemned for allowing users to generate pictures and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of making graphic material of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the production and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting images of persons in a graphic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to remove it quickly when they learn of it.
