Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked significant backlash after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change images of women by stripping their attire.
Numerous cases have emerged where the system has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, other than an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a jail term and heavy fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to generate images and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of creating inappropriate content of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the production and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own usage rules prohibits "portraying likenesses of persons in a pornographic way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "suitable steps" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing illegal content on their services and to remove it swiftly when they become aware of it.
