Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused significant anger after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by taking off their attire.
Several examples have emerged where the system has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to inquiries, except for an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people viewing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a post.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also can alter an posted image through its AI image editing tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to generate photos and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of making sexually explicit material of public figures.
"X has been enabling the generation and sharing of these images for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "portraying images of people in a graphic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share private pictures or illegal content" and stated this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "necessary steps" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
