Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked significant outrage after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of females by stripping their attire.
Numerous cases have been seen where the system has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate situations.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government representative stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw image stripping technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "face a jail term and substantial fines".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Position and Platform Functionality
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.
Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted image through its AI image editing feature.
History of Criticism and Rules
The tool has been faulted for enabling users to produce images and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of generating graphic material of celebrities.
"X has been permitting the creation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service bans "showing likenesses of individuals in a graphic way".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this included explicit AI images made with AI.
It said services such as X were required to take "appropriate steps" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they are notified of it.
