Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused widespread anger after people utilized its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate photos of women by taking off their clothing.
Numerous instances have been seen where the tool has been used to digitally undress female subjects to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in sexualized situations.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw nudification tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional features—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded photo through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been criticised for enabling users to produce images and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of generating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"X has been allowing the creation and spread of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "portraying images of persons in a graphic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and clarified this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to remove it promptly when they are notified of it.
