Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked major backlash after people used its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of females by removing their garments.
Several instances have been seen where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, did not respond to questions, other than an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being introduced to outlaw nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a jail term and substantial fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the potential" of people accessing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' queries when they reference it in a post.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded photo through its AI image editing function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for permitting users to create photos and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of creating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the generation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting images of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "necessary measures" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they are notified of it.
