The Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Changes Photographs of Women to Digitally Undress Them
The social media platform X has caused widespread outrage after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of females by stripping their garments.
Multiple cases have emerged where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.
Developer Response and Regulatory Position
XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government representative stated that legislation is being introduced to ban nudification software. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a prison sentence and significant penalties".
"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality
The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was currently examining X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to give commentary or more context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The system has been condemned for permitting users to produce images and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate material of public figures.
"The platform has been permitting the generation and spread of these images for months without taking any action and we have not seen any action by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included explicit AI images created with AI.
It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their platforms and to remove it swiftly when they are notified of it.
