Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked widespread backlash after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate photos of females by removing their attire.
Several examples have emerged where the technology has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Legal Position
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to ban nudification software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a jail term and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."
Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the potential" of people accessing unlawful material 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 free artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which responds to X users' requests when they mention it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to give commentary or additional background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.
History of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to produce pictures and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit material of public figures.
"The platform has been enabling the production and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "portraying images of individuals in a sexually explicit manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate actions" to "reduce the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to remove it swiftly when they become aware of it.
