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Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked significant backlash after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter images of females by removing their garments.

Numerous instances have been seen where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.

Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance

XAI, the organization that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an auto-reply response stating "legacy media lies".

A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such technology would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".

"The platform has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."

Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality

The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the potential" of people accessing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.

Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for functions—which answers X users' prompts when they tag it in a post.

It is commonly used to provide commentary or more background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of alter an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.

History of Criticism and Policy

The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to produce pictures and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier accused of generating inappropriate content of celebrities.

"The platform has been enabling the production 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 acceptable use policy bans "depicting images of persons in a pornographic way".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and stated this applied to explicit AI images made with AI.

It said networks such as X were required to take "suitable steps" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.