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Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked widespread outrage after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to change images of females by stripping their clothing.

Numerous instances have been seen where the technology has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.

Company Reaction and Regulatory Position

XAI, the firm that created Grok, did not respond to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".

A government official stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a prison sentence and heavy penalties".

"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."

Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities

The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.

Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a tweet.

It is frequently used to give commentary or further background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted photo through its AI image editing function.

History of Controversy and Policy

The system has been faulted for allowing users to create images and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of creating inappropriate content of public figures.

"The platform has been permitting the creation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.

XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing images of individuals in a pornographic fashion".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this included explicit AI images created with AI.

It said networks such as X were required to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their services and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.