Elon Musk's social media network X has caused major backlash after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of females by stripping their attire.
Several examples have emerged where the system has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw nudification software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "face a jail term and heavy fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which responds to X users' queries when they reference it in a message.
It is often used to give reactions or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been condemned for permitting users to generate images and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier accused of generating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"X has been allowing the creation and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting images of persons in a pornographic manner".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and stated this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.
