The social media platform X has provoked major anger after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of females by taking off their attire.
Multiple cases have been seen where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.
Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance
XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A government official stated that new laws is being introduced to ban nudification technology. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and significant fines".
"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which answers X users' requests when they mention it in a message.
It is frequently used to provide commentary or more background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to generate photos and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past accused of making inappropriate material of celebrities.
"X has been enabling the generation and distribution of these images for months without taking any action and we have not seen any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "portraying images of persons in a graphic fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and stated this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.
It said services such as X were obligated to take "necessary measures" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.
