Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked widespread anger after users utilized its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of females by taking off their clothing.
Numerous examples have surfaced where the system has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to prohibit nudification technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' queries when they tag it in a message.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been criticised for permitting users to produce pictures and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the generation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting images of individuals in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "appropriate actions" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
