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Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked widespread anger after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by removing their garments.

Multiple instances have surfaced where the tool has been employed to virtually strip women to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate situations.

Company Reaction and Legal Position

XAI, the company behind Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".

A government representative stated that new laws is being proposed to prohibit nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such technology would "be subject to a prison sentence and substantial fines".

"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."

Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality

The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.

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

It is commonly used to give commentary or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.

Background of Criticism and Rules

The system has been condemned for enabling users to produce images and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in making graphic content of celebrities.

"X has been enabling the generation and sharing of these images for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any action by regulators," the expert added.

XAI's own terms of service bans "showing likenesses of individuals in a pornographic way".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images created with AI.

It said networks such as X were required to take "appropriate measures" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.