Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked major outrage after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate images of women by stripping their clothing.
Numerous instances have been seen where the system has been used to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear without permission, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification tools. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the potential" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional features—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is frequently used to give commentary or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been faulted for permitting users to produce photos and footage with nudity and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of generating graphic material of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the generation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting images of people in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or circulate private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.
