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Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked major anger after individuals utilized its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of females by removing their attire.

Several cases have emerged where the technology has been employed to digitally undress women to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit situations.

Developer Reaction and Legal Position

XAI, the company behind Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, except for an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".

A Home Office official stated that new laws is being brought forward to prohibit nudification technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and heavy penalties".

"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."

Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities

The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.

Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium features—which responds to X users' prompts when they mention it in a message.

It is frequently used to provide reactions or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of alter an uploaded picture through its AI image editing tool.

History of Criticism and Rules

The tool has been condemned for enabling users to generate pictures and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate material of public figures.

"X has been enabling the production and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.

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

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

It said platforms such as X were required to take "appropriate measures" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.