The social media network X has sparked major anger after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of females by taking off their attire.
Several examples have emerged where the tool has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw nudification software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."
Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which answers X users' queries when they tag it in a post.
It is commonly used to give reactions or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to edit an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.
History of Controversy and Rules
The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to generate images and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of generating inappropriate material of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "depicting images of people in a pornographic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or distribute non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes made with AI.
It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to remove it swiftly when they learn of it.
