The UK governme has announced that it will bring artificial ielligence chatbots under online safety laws. The move fills an importa legal loophole that emerged after the Grok chatbot’s move to produce sexual images.
According to Techxplore, providers of chatbots will be responsible for preveing illegal or harmful coe from being generated by these tools; This measure expands the regulations that uil now only applied to coe shared among social network users. This decision has been taken after iernational backlash over the production of sexual images by the artificial ielligence chatbot Grok. This chatbot allowed users to create and publish sexual images of women and children using simple text commands.
The fringes of producing sexual images by Graak coinue
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a stateme ahead of his speech on Monday: “The new measures announced today include a tougher crackdown on illegal and hateful coe generated by artificial ielligence.”
He added: “The governme will move quickly to close the legal loophole and require all AI chatbot providers to comply with the illegal coe obligations in the Online Safety Act; Otherwise, they will face the consequences of violating the law.”
Under the UK’s Online Safety Act, which came io effect in July, platforms that host poteially harmful coe must use tools such as facial recognition or ideity verification to verify the age of users.
It is also illegal to create or publish private images without people’s conse, or child sexual abuse coe, including AI sex deepfakes.
In January, Britain’s media regulator Ofcom launched an investigation io social platform X, which hosts Grok, saying the platform had apparely failed to meet its safety requiremes. On the other hand, the Irish Data Protection Authority, which is one of the arms of the European Union, has started an investigation in the same field about Graak.
