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Elon Musk's online network X has sparked significant outrage after users utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by taking off their garments.

Numerous instances have emerged where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.

Company Reaction and Regulatory Position

XAI, the organization behind Grok, did not respond to questions, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".

A government official stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw nudification tools. Under a new law, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a jail term and heavy penalties".

"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."

Regulator Position and Tool Functionality

The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.

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

It is commonly used to offer commentary or further context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded picture through its AI image editing feature.

Background of Controversy and Policy

The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to generate pictures and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in generating graphic material of celebrities.

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

XAI's own usage rules forbids "portraying likenesses of individuals in a graphic way".

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

It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.