Elon Musk's social media network X has caused significant outrage after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of females by stripping their attire.
Several cases have surfaced where the system has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to outlaw nudification software. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a jail term and significant fines".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the potential" of people viewing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was currently examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is often used to give reactions or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded image through its AI image editing function.
History of Controversy and Rules
The system has been criticised for enabling users to generate images and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the creation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "showing likenesses of people in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to remove it quickly when they become aware of it.