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Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked major anger after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by stripping their clothing.

Multiple instances have been seen where the technology has been used to digitally undress women to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to place them in sexually explicit scenarios.

Company Reaction and Regulatory Position

XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".

A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to prohibit nudification technology. Under a new law, anyone who provided such tools would "face a jail term and significant fines".

"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."

Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities

The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.

Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some premium features—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a message.

It is frequently used to give commentary or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of alter an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.

Background of Criticism and Rules

The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to produce pictures and footage with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating graphic material of celebrities.

"The platform has been permitting the generation and spread of these images for months without taking any action and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.

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

In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or circulate private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this covered explicit AI images made with AI.

It said networks such as X were obligated to take "necessary measures" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.