Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked major anger after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of women by stripping their garments.
Multiple examples have emerged where the tool has been used to virtually strip women to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, except for an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being proposed to prohibit nudification technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is often used to offer reactions or additional context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of alter an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to produce photos and videos with nudity and sexualised material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the production and spread of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting likenesses of individuals in a graphic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing illegal material on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they become aware of it.
