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Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked significant backlash after people used its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of females by removing their clothing.

Several cases have been seen where the tool has been used to digitally undress female subjects to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.

Company Reaction and Legal Position

XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, did not respond to inquiries, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".

A government representative stated that new laws is being introduced to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and heavy penalties".

"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."

Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality

The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.

Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' queries when they mention it in a tweet.

It is often used to give commentary or more background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.

Background of Criticism and Policy

The tool has been faulted for enabling users to generate images and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making sexually explicit content of public figures.

"The platform has been permitting the creation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.

XAI's own usage rules bans "showing images of individuals in a sexually explicit way".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and confirmed this included explicit AI images generated with AI.

It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "appropriate steps" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing illegal content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.