Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked significant outrage after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of females by removing their attire.
Numerous cases have been seen where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an auto-reply response 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 supplied such tools would "receive a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium functions—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a post.
It is often used to offer commentary or further context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an posted image through its AI image editing tool.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to generate photos and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of making sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and sharing of these images 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 bans "depicting images of people in a sexually explicit way".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or circulate non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "necessary measures" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.
