Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked major outrage after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of females by removing their garments.
Several cases have emerged where the technology has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, did not respond to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they mention it in a message.
It is commonly used to offer reactions or more background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of alter an posted picture through its AI image editing function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been criticised for permitting users to generate images and videos with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the generation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "showing images of persons in a graphic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or share private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
