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Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked significant outrage after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of females by removing their garments.

Several cases have emerged where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.

Developer Response and Regulatory Stance

XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, did not respond to questions, other than an standard message stating "legacy media lies".

A government official stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban image stripping technology. Under a new law, anyone who distributed such technology would "face a jail term and substantial penalties".

"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."

Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities

The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.

Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium features—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.

It is frequently used to provide reactions or additional background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.

History of Controversy and Rules

The tool has been condemned for enabling users to generate images and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in making graphic material of public figures.

"The platform has been enabling the production and spread of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.

XAI's own terms of service bans "portraying likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit way".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included explicit AI images made with AI.

It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.