Elon Musk's online network X has provoked significant backlash after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to change images of females by removing their clothing.
Numerous cases have been seen where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Response and Legal Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an standard response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of alter an posted picture through its AI image editing feature.
History of Controversy and Rules
The tool has been criticised for permitting users to create images and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of making sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "showing images of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the danger" of users viewing illegal material on their platforms and to remove it swiftly when they are notified of it.
