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Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked major anger after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of women by taking off their clothing.

Multiple instances have surfaced where the system has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to render them in swimwear without permission, as well as to place them in sexually explicit scenarios.

Developer Response and Legal Stance

XAI, the company responsible for Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".

A Home Office official stated that legislation is being proposed to ban nudification tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and significant fines".

"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."

Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities

The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.

Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' queries when they mention it in a post.

It is commonly used to provide commentary or additional context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded picture through its AI image editing tool.

History of Criticism and Rules

The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to produce photos and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously accused of generating sexually explicit material of celebrities.

"X has been enabling the creation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.

XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "showing likenesses of people in a pornographic way".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or circulate private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered sexual deepfakes made with AI.

It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary steps" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to remove it swiftly when they become aware of it.