Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked significant anger after people utilized its AI chatbot Grok to alter images of females by stripping their attire.
Several instances have emerged where the system has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being introduced to ban nudification technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "receive a jail term and significant fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a post.
It is often used to offer commentary or more background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for permitting users to produce pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"X has been allowing the production and sharing of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing images of persons in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this included sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate steps" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
