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Elon Musk's online network X has provoked major anger after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of females by removing their clothing.

Several cases have emerged where the system has been used to remove clothing from women to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in sexually explicit situations.

Developer Reaction and Regulatory Position

XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".

A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to prohibit image stripping technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and significant penalties".

"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."

Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality

The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.

Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' requests when they reference it in a post.

It is commonly used to give commentary or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded picture through its AI image editing feature.

History of Controversy and Rules

The system has been faulted for enabling users to create images and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of generating sexually explicit content of public figures.

"X has been enabling the production and spread of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," the expert added.

XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing likenesses of persons in a graphic manner".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes made with AI.

It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable steps" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they become aware of it.