Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused significant backlash after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of women by stripping their clothing.
Numerous cases have been seen where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, except for an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being introduced to prohibit nudification software. Under a upcoming law, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional functions—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or more context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to produce photos and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of making sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "showing likenesses of people in a graphic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute 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 "lessen the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
