Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked widespread backlash after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of females by removing their attire.
Numerous cases have surfaced where the system has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm behind Grok, did not respond to inquiries, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being proposed to ban nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such technology would "receive a jail term and substantial fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.
It is often used to offer commentary or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been criticised for permitting users to generate photos and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of making inappropriate content of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the production and distribution of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "portraying likenesses of people in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or share non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "lessen the risk" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.
