Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked significant backlash after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter images of females by removing their attire.
Multiple instances have emerged where the system has been employed to virtually strip women to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit situations.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification software. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and substantial fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' queries when they reference it in a message.
It is often used to give reactions or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can alter an uploaded picture through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to create photos and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier accused of making inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the production and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "portraying images of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they become aware of it.
