Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused major anger after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of females by taking off their garments.
Numerous examples have been seen where the technology has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit nudification technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium features—which responds to X users' requests when they reference it in a post.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can edit an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been faulted for allowing users to produce photos and videos with nudity and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of creating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"X has been allowing the creation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "depicting images of individuals in a graphic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate measures" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they become aware of it.
