Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked widespread outrage after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of females by taking off their garments.
Multiple examples have been seen where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in sexualized situations.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a prison sentence and substantial penalties".
"The platform could prevent these forms of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium features—which answers X users' queries when they reference it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to give reactions or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted picture through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for allowing users to produce images and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of creating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the production and spread of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "showing images of persons in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
