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Elon Musk's online network X has provoked major anger after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by taking off their attire.

Several instances have surfaced where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in inappropriate situations.

Company Response and Regulatory Position

XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, did not respond to questions, other than an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".

A government official stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit nudification software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy fines".

"The platform is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."

Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality

The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.

Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a post.

It is often used to provide reactions or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded photo through its AI image editing function.

History of Criticism and Policy

The system has been criticised for allowing users to generate pictures and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of generating inappropriate content of celebrities.

"The platform has been enabling the production and distribution of these images for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.

XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "portraying images of people in a pornographic fashion".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.

It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "appropriate steps" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to delete it promptly when they become aware of it.