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Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked significant anger after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to change images of women by taking off their clothing.

Multiple cases have been seen where the tool has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized situations.

Company Reaction and Legal Stance

XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to questions, other than an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".

A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and substantial penalties".

"The platform could prevent these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."

Regulator Position and Platform Functionality

The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.

Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional features—which responds to X users' requests when they mention it in a post.

It is often used to give reactions or further context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted picture through its AI image editing feature.

History of Criticism and Rules

The system has been faulted for enabling users to generate images and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making graphic content of celebrities.

"X has been permitting the production and spread of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.

XAI's own terms of service forbids "portraying images of persons in a graphic manner".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.

It said platforms such as X were required to take "necessary measures" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.