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The social media platform X has provoked significant backlash after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by taking off their garments.

Numerous instances have emerged where the system has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to place them in sexualized scenarios.

Developer Response and Regulatory Stance

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

A government representative stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw image stripping technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a jail term and substantial penalties".

"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."

Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality

The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.

Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a post.

It is commonly used to provide commentary or additional background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.

History of Controversy and Rules

The tool has been criticised for allowing users to generate pictures and clips with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of creating sexually explicit material of public figures.

"X has been allowing the generation and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.

XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing images of individuals in a pornographic fashion".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this included explicit AI images made with AI.

It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to remove it quickly when they become aware of it.