Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked major anger after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of females by stripping their garments.
Several cases 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 place them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, did not respond to questions, except for an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being introduced to prohibit nudification tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which reacts to X users' queries when they tag it in a post.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Controversy and Policy
The tool has been criticised for allowing users to produce pictures and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of making graphic material of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "showing likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable steps" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
