The social media network X has sparked significant anger after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of women by taking off their attire.
Numerous instances have emerged where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in inappropriate situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to questions, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' queries when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to give commentary or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for allowing users to generate photos and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in generating graphic content of public figures.
"X has been permitting the production and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "portraying images of people in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or distribute non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable measures" to "lessen the risk" of users viewing illegal material on their services and to take down it quickly when they are notified of it.
