The social media network X has sparked significant anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of females by taking off their attire.
Several cases have surfaced where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in inappropriate scenarios.
Developer Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, except for an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to prohibit nudification technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to offer commentary or more background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to generate pictures and clips with nudity and sexualised content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate content of public figures.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and distribution of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "portraying likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the risk" of users viewing illegal content on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.