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Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused major backlash after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of females by stripping their garments.

Multiple instances have surfaced where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.

Developer Reaction and Legal Position

XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an standard response stating "legacy media lies".

A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw nudification technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and significant penalties".

"X or Grok could prevent these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."

Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality

The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.

Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium features—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a message.

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

History of Controversy and Rules

The chatbot has been condemned for allowing users to generate pictures and clips with nudity and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit material of celebrities.

"The platform has been allowing the generation and spread of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.

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

In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.

It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.