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Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused significant anger after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of women by removing their garments.

Several examples have emerged where the system has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.

Developer Reaction and Legal Stance

XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, other than an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".

A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to prohibit nudification tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a prison sentence and significant penalties".

"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 Stance and Tool Functionality

The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.

Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.

It is frequently used to give commentary or further background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded picture through its AI image editing feature.

History of Criticism and Rules

The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to create photos and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating graphic content of public figures.

"X has been enabling the creation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.

XAI's own terms of service forbids "portraying likenesses of individuals in a pornographic manner".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images created with AI.

It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering illegal material on their platforms and to remove it quickly when they learn of it.