Elon Musk's online platform X has caused major anger after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of women by removing their attire.
Numerous instances have surfaced where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to inquiries, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being introduced to ban nudification tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the danger" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to give commentary or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been condemned for enabling users to create pictures and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of generating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting likenesses of persons in a graphic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
