The social media network X has caused major anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change images of females by stripping their attire.
Numerous cases have been seen where the system has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to show them in swimwear without permission, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, other than an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to outlaw nudification technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive 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 "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional features—which responds to X users' requests when they mention it in a message.
It is commonly used to give reactions or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of alter an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
Background of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to generate pictures and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating graphic content of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and sharing of these images for months without taking any action and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "depicting images of persons in a graphic fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes created with AI.
It said platforms such as X were required to take "necessary steps" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to remove it promptly when they become aware of it.
