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Elon Musk's social media network X has caused major anger after people utilized its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of females by stripping their attire.

Numerous examples have surfaced where the tool has been used to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.

Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance

XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an standard message stating "traditional news outlets lies".

A Home Office official stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw image stripping technology. Under a new law, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a prison sentence and heavy fines".

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

Regulator Position and Platform Functionality

The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was currently examining X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.

Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.

It is commonly used to provide commentary or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also can modify an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.

History of Controversy and Policy

The chatbot has been criticised for allowing users to generate pictures and videos with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating graphic content of public figures.

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

XAI's own terms of service forbids "portraying images of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included explicit AI images generated with AI.

It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.