The social media network X has sparked widespread outrage after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of females by removing their clothing.
Multiple examples have surfaced where the technology has been used to virtually strip women to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being introduced to prohibit nudification technology. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and heavy fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they tag it in a post.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of alter an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to generate images and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating graphic material of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the generation and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing likenesses of persons in a graphic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or circulate private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate measures" to "reduce the danger" of users viewing illegal content on their platforms and to remove it promptly when they are notified of it.
