Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked significant outrage after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to change images of females by stripping their garments.
Numerous examples have surfaced where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the organization that created Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' queries when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to give commentary or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an posted picture through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for allowing users to generate pictures and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of generating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the production and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "portraying images of individuals in a graphic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or circulate non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "necessary steps" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they learn of it.
