Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked significant outrage after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of females by taking off their attire.
Several examples have been seen where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate scenarios.
Company Reaction and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, except for an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the potential" of people viewing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.
It is frequently used to give commentary or further context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of alter an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
History of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been condemned for enabling users to generate images and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of creating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"X has been allowing the creation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting images of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "necessary measures" to "lessen the risk" of users viewing illegal material on their services and to take down it swiftly when they are notified of it.
