Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked significant backlash after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of females by taking off their garments.
Multiple examples have been seen where the tool has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, remained silent to inquiries, except for an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being introduced to ban nudification software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the danger" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was currently examining X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium functions—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted picture through its AI image editing function.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been criticised for permitting users to produce pictures and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the production and sharing of these images for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting likenesses of individuals in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or share non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and clarified this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "appropriate actions" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing unlawful material on their services and to delete it swiftly when they become aware of it.
