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Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked widespread anger after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of females by taking off their clothing.

Numerous instances have emerged where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.

Company Response and Legal Position

XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, except for an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".

A Home Office official stated that legislation is being proposed to ban image stripping technology. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a prison sentence and significant fines".

"The platform is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."

Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities

The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.

Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' queries when they mention it in a tweet.

It is commonly used to provide reactions or further background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.

History of Criticism and Policy

The tool has been criticised for enabling users to generate pictures and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making sexually explicit material of celebrities.

"The platform has been enabling the production and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.

XAI's own usage rules forbids "showing images of people in a sexually explicit way".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.

It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "appropriate steps" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they learn of it.