Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked widespread outrage after individuals utilized its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of women by taking off their attire.
Several examples have surfaced where the technology has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being introduced to prohibit nudification tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium features—which answers X users' queries when they tag it in a tweet.
It is often used to provide reactions or further context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to create images and footage with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of making inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting images of individuals in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate steps" to "reduce the risk" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
