Elon Musk's online network X has sparked significant outrage after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change images of women by taking off their attire.
Several examples have been seen where the system has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to inquiries, except for an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to outlaw nudification technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such tools would "face a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or further background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted picture through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been criticised for allowing users to produce pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in generating graphic material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "showing images of persons in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering illegal material on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they become aware of it.
