Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked widespread outrage after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of women by removing their clothing.
Multiple instances have been seen where the technology has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate situations.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm that created Grok, remained silent to questions, other than an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "face a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform could prevent these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional features—which answers X users' requests when they mention it in a message.
It is frequently used to offer reactions or more context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can edit an posted image through its AI image editing function.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been criticised for allowing users to generate photos and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting images of people in a sexually explicit manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
