Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked widespread outrage after individuals utilized its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of females by stripping their clothing.
Numerous examples have been seen where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, except for an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to prohibit nudification technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the potential" of people viewing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium functions—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted photo through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been condemned for enabling users to produce photos and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of making inappropriate content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the generation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate steps" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing illegal content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.
