Elon Musk's social media network X has caused major anger after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by taking off their clothing.
Multiple examples have surfaced where the tool has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit scenarios.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being introduced to prohibit nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.
It is commonly used to provide commentary or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been criticised for enabling users to generate images and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit material of celebrities.
"The platform has been enabling the production and spread of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "depicting likenesses of individuals in a graphic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or circulate private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "suitable steps" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.
