Elon Musk's online network X has caused widespread backlash after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of females by taking off their garments.
Multiple instances have been seen where the technology has been employed to digitally undress women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization that created Grok, did not respond to inquiries, except for an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform could prevent these forms of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is often used to provide commentary or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Rules
The system has been criticised for enabling users to produce images and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of making inappropriate content of public figures.
"X has been allowing the creation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "depicting images of people in a graphic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering illegal material on their services and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
