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Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked widespread anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of women by stripping their clothing.

Numerous cases have emerged where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.

Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance

XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, aside from an standard response stating "legacy media lies".

A Home Office official stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw nudification technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and substantial penalties".

"The platform could prevent these types of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."

Regulator Position and Tool Functionality

The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.

Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for functions—which reacts to X users' requests when they tag it in a post.

It is commonly used to provide reactions or additional background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an posted image through its AI image editing function.

Background of Controversy and Policy

The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to produce pictures and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating graphic content of celebrities.

"X has been allowing the generation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.

XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "showing images of people in a sexually explicit way".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.

It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary steps" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.