Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused widespread anger after individuals used its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of women by taking off their attire.
Multiple examples have surfaced where the technology has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw nudification tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and substantial fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the potential" of people viewing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional features—which responds to X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for permitting users to generate photos and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of creating inappropriate material of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the generation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "showing images of individuals in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or circulate private pictures or illegal content" and stated this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary actions" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to remove it swiftly when they are notified of it.
