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Elon Musk's social media network X has caused major anger after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of females by taking off their clothing.

Numerous cases have been seen where the system has been employed to virtually strip women to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.

Company Response and Regulatory Stance

XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".

A government official stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant fines".

"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."

Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality

The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was currently examining X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.

Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.

It is frequently used to provide reactions or more context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.

Background of Criticism and Policy

The system has been criticised for allowing users to create photos and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit content of celebrities.

"The platform has been permitting the production and distribution of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," the expert added.

XAI's own terms of service prohibits "showing images of persons in a graphic way".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.

It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across unlawful material on their services and to remove it promptly when they are notified of it.