Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked widespread anger after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of females by removing their garments.
Numerous instances have been seen where the system has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Response 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 government representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.
It is frequently used to give commentary or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can alter an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for allowing users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating graphic material of public figures.
"X has been allowing the creation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "portraying likenesses of persons in a pornographic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
