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Elon Musk's online platform X has caused major anger after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by taking off their attire.

Numerous examples have surfaced where the technology has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in sexually explicit scenarios.

Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance

XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".

A Home Office official stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw nudification software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who distributed such technology would "receive a prison sentence and substantial penalties".

"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."

Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities

The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.

Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which answers X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.

It is commonly used to offer reactions or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.

History of Criticism and Policy

The chatbot has been criticised for allowing users to create pictures and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in making graphic content of celebrities.

"The platform has been allowing the creation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.

XAI's own usage rules bans "portraying images of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.

It said platforms such as X were required to take "necessary steps" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to remove it quickly when they become aware of it.