Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked major anger after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of women by stripping their attire.
Numerous examples have been seen where the technology has been employed to digitally undress women to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to questions, other than an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that legislation is being introduced to prohibit nudification technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "face a jail term and substantial fines".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "consider the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' requests when they reference it in a message.
It is often used to give commentary or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing function.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for permitting users to create pictures and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of creating graphic content of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the production and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "depicting likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or share private pictures or illegal content" and stated this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate actions" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to remove it swiftly when they are notified of it.
