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Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked significant anger after users used its AI chatbot Grok to change images of women by stripping their attire.

Multiple instances have emerged where the system has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.

Developer Reaction and Legal Stance

XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".

A Home Office official stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a prison sentence and significant penalties".

"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."

Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities

The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.

Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' requests when they mention it in a tweet.

It is often used to give commentary or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded picture through its AI image editing function.

History of Criticism and Rules

The system has been faulted for enabling users to generate images and clips with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of making sexually explicit content of public figures.

"The platform has been allowing the production and spread of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.

XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit way".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or circulate private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.

It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.