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Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked significant anger after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of women by taking off their garments.

Several examples have surfaced where the tool has been used to virtually strip female subjects to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in sexualized situations.

Company Response and Regulatory Position

XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an standard response stating "legacy media lies".

A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw image stripping software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "be subject to a jail term and heavy penalties".

"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."

Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities

The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.

Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they mention it in a message.

It is frequently used to offer reactions or more background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.

History of Criticism and Policy

The system has been criticised for enabling users to produce images and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in generating graphic material of celebrities.

"X has been enabling the creation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.

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

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

It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate measures" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they are notified of it.