The online platform X has sparked major anger after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of females by taking off their attire.
Numerous instances have surfaced where the tool has been used to remove clothing from women to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in sexualized scenarios.
Developer Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to inquiries, except for an standard message stating "legacy media lies".
A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit nudification technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these forms of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Tool Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' queries when they reference it in a message.
It is commonly used to give commentary or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can modify an posted picture through its AI image editing function.
History of Controversy and Rules
The system has been criticised for allowing users to create images and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of creating sexually explicit content of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the production and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting images of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate measures" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they learn of it.
