Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked significant anger after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of women by removing their clothing.
Numerous examples have been seen where the system has been used to digitally undress female subjects to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit situations.
Developer Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, did not respond to questions, aside from an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit nudification technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a jail term and substantial fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people viewing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which answers X users' queries when they tag it in a tweet.
It is often used to provide commentary or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded photo through its AI image editing function.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to produce photos and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating graphic material of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the production and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "depicting images of people in a graphic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or circulate private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
