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Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked major anger after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of women by taking off their clothing.

Numerous examples have been seen where the system has been used to remove clothing from women to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate situations.

Company Response and Regulatory Stance

XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, did not respond to questions, aside from an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".

A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw nudification tools. Under a new law, anyone who provided such technology would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".

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

Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality

The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.

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

It is often used to offer reactions or further context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an posted photo through its AI image editing tool.

History of Controversy and Rules

The system has been faulted for enabling users to create pictures and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of making inappropriate material of public figures.

"X has been enabling the production and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.

XAI's own usage rules bans "depicting likenesses of individuals in a graphic manner".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.

It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they become aware of it.