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Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked significant anger after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of women by taking off their clothing.

Several instances have been seen where the technology has been used to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in inappropriate scenarios.

Developer Response and Regulatory Position

XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".

A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit image stripping tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who distributed such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant fines".

"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."

Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities

The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.

Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium functions—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.

It is frequently used to provide reactions or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.

History of Controversy and Policy

The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to generate images and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of generating sexually explicit content of celebrities.

"X has been enabling the creation and spread of these images for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.

XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "showing images of individuals in a pornographic way".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included explicit AI images made with AI.

It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to take down it quickly when they are notified of it.