Elon Musk's online platform X has caused significant anger after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to change photos of females by removing their clothing.
Several cases have been seen where the system has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Response and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide reactions or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been criticised for enabling users to produce images and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier accused of generating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the production and spread of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "showing likenesses of people in a graphic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and confirmed this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their services and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.
