Elon Musk's online network X has sparked widespread backlash after people utilized its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of females by taking off their attire.
Numerous examples have surfaced where the technology has been used to digitally undress women to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw image stripping software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a post.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The system has been condemned for permitting users to create images and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of making sexually explicit material of public figures.
"X has been enabling the production and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing images of people in a graphic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "suitable measures" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their services and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
