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Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked major outrage after users employed its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of women by removing their clothing.

Numerous cases have emerged where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.

Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance

XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".

A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a jail term and substantial penalties".

"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."

Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities

The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.

Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.

It is commonly used to offer commentary or further background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of alter an posted picture through its AI image editing function.

History of Criticism and Rules

The system has been condemned for permitting users to produce pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making graphic material of public figures.

"X has been enabling the creation and distribution of these images for months without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.

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

In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included explicit AI images generated with AI.

It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering illegal material on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they are notified of it.