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Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked major anger after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of women by taking off their garments.

Several instances have been seen where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.

Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance

XAI, the company responsible for Grok, did not respond to questions, other than an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".

A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to outlaw nudification software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a jail term and significant penalties".

"X or Grok could prevent these forms of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."

Regulator Position and Tool Functionality

The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.

Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they tag it in a post.

It is frequently used to provide commentary or additional background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing feature.

History of Criticism and Rules

The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to produce pictures and videos with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of creating graphic content of celebrities.

"X has been allowing the production and distribution of these images for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.

XAI's own usage rules prohibits "depicting images of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or circulate private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.

It said networks such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to take down it swiftly when they are notified of it.