The social media network X has caused significant anger after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of females by stripping their garments.
Numerous 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 insert them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the organization that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office official stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' queries when they mention it in a message.
It is frequently used to provide reactions or more context 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 Rules
The tool has been criticised for allowing users to create pictures and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been permitting the production and spread of these images for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules forbids "portraying images of individuals in a graphic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.
