The social media network X has sparked significant anger after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter images of women by taking off their garments.
Multiple examples have been seen where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate situations.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the company responsible for Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to outlaw nudification software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "be subject to a jail term and significant fines".
"The platform could prevent these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a message.
It is often used to offer reactions or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted image through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The system has been criticised for enabling users to create pictures and videos with nudity and sexualised material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the creation and distribution of these images for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "showing images of individuals in a graphic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this covered explicit AI images created with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.
