Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked major anger after individuals utilized its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of females by stripping their garments.
Numerous examples have emerged where the system has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to questions, other than an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being introduced to prohibit nudification software. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a jail term and heavy fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "consider the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a tweet.
It is often used to provide commentary or additional background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an posted picture through its AI image editing tool.
History of Controversy and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for allowing users to produce photos and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "depicting images of persons in a graphic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
