Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked significant outrage after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of women by taking off their attire.
Several examples have surfaced where the tool has been used to digitally undress women to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"The platform could prevent these forms of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they tag it in a post.
It is often used to offer commentary or more context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been condemned for enabling users to create photos and videos with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of making inappropriate content of public figures.
"X has been allowing the generation and distribution of these images for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "portraying images of people in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "lessen the risk" of users viewing illegal material on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they are notified of it.
