Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked widespread outrage after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of women by removing their attire.
Numerous cases have emerged where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in inappropriate scenarios.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw nudification tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a jail term and substantial penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the potential" of people viewing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a post.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or additional background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded image through its AI image editing function.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for permitting users to create images and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of creating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"X has been allowing the production and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "showing images of persons in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "appropriate actions" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.
