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Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked major outrage after individuals utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of women by stripping their attire.

Several instances have been seen where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.

Company Reaction and Regulatory Position

XAI, the company that created Grok, did not respond to inquiries, other than an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".

A government official stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a prison sentence and heavy fines".

"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."

Regulator Position and Platform Functionality

The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.

Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' requests when they mention it in a tweet.

It is frequently used to offer reactions or more background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.

History of Criticism and Policy

The tool has been faulted for enabling users to produce pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate material of celebrities.

"The platform has been permitting the creation and distribution of these images for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any action by regulators," the expert added.

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

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

It said networks such as X were obligated to take "necessary measures" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they learn of it.