The social media platform X has provoked major outrage after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter pictures of females by stripping their garments.
Several examples have surfaced where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or additional background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Controversy and Policy
The system has been condemned for allowing users to generate images and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier accused of creating inappropriate material of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and sharing of these images for months without taking any action and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting images of persons in a graphic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or circulate non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable measures" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.
