Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked major anger after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of females by removing their clothing.
Numerous instances have emerged where the tool has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit situations.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, did not respond to inquiries, except for an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such technology would "be subject to a jail term and significant penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they tag it in a message.
It is often used to give commentary or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can alter an posted photo through its AI image editing tool.
History of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been criticised for permitting users to generate images and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making graphic material of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "portraying images of people in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "lessen the risk" of users viewing illegal material on their services and to delete it promptly when they become aware of it.
