Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked significant outrage after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of females by removing their garments.
Several examples have been seen where the technology has been employed to digitally undress women to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw nudification technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' queries when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded picture through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to produce pictures and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of creating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and sharing of these images for months without taking any action and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "showing images of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate actions" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.
