Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked widespread backlash after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of women by taking off their clothing.
Numerous instances have been seen where the tool has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to place them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, remained silent to questions, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being introduced to prohibit nudification software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a jail term and heavy fines".
"The platform could prevent these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' queries when they mention it in a post.
It is frequently used to give reactions or more background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to produce photos and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of generating inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the production and spread of these images for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "showing likenesses of people in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "suitable steps" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to remove it promptly when they learn of it.
