Elon Musk's online platform X has caused widespread backlash after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate photos of females by taking off their attire.
Numerous examples have emerged where the system has been employed to digitally undress women to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexualized scenarios.
Developer Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a jail term and substantial penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional features—which responds to X users' queries when they mention it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted image through its AI image editing function.
History of Criticism and Rules
The system has been faulted for enabling users to generate images and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of generating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the production and sharing of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "depicting images of people in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering illegal material on their services and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
