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Elon Musk's social media network X has caused significant anger after people used its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of females by stripping their garments.

Several instances have emerged where the system has been used to digitally undress female subjects to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in inappropriate scenarios.

Company Response and Legal Stance

XAI, the company responsible for Grok, remained silent to inquiries, other than an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".

A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to prohibit nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a jail term and substantial fines".

"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."

Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality

The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.

Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which reacts to X users' prompts when they reference it in a post.

It is commonly used to provide reactions or more background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an posted picture through its AI image editing tool.

History of Controversy and Rules

The chatbot has been condemned for permitting users to create photos and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate material of celebrities.

"X has been enabling the production and spread of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.

XAI's own terms of service forbids "portraying likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit manner".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.

It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary measures" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their services and to delete it promptly when they become aware of it.