Elon Musk's social media network X has caused significant anger after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of women by taking off their attire.
Multiple examples have emerged where the technology has been used to virtually strip female subjects to render them in swimwear without permission, as well as to put them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, remained silent to inquiries, except for an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit nudification software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and heavy fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to give commentary or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been faulted for enabling users to produce pictures and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating graphic content of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the production and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "depicting images of persons in a graphic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
