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Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked significant outrage after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of females by stripping their clothing.

Several examples have been seen where the tool has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate scenarios.

Company Reaction and Legal Stance

XAI, the organization that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".

A government representative stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit image stripping technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a prison sentence and significant penalties".

"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."

Regulator Position and Platform Functionality

The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the potential" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently examining X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.

Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' requests when they reference it in a post.

It is commonly used to offer reactions or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can alter an posted image through its AI image editing function.

History of Criticism and Policy

The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to generate images and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate material of celebrities.

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

XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting likenesses of people in a sexually explicit manner".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images made with AI.

It said services such as X were required to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the danger" of users viewing unlawful material on their services and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.