Elon Musk's online network X has sparked significant anger after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of women by taking off their clothing.
Numerous cases have emerged where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being proposed to prohibit nudification software. Under a new law, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to offer commentary or more background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to create photos and footage with nudity and sexualised material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the production and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "showing images of persons in a graphic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or share deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
