Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked major outrage after individuals used its AI chatbot Grok to alter images of women by removing their attire.
Numerous instances have emerged where the tool has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit nudification tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a post.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been condemned for enabling users to create photos and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of creating inappropriate material of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and sharing of these images for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "depicting likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary steps" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across illegal material on their services and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
