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Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked widespread backlash after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of females by stripping their clothing.

Numerous examples have emerged where the tool has been used to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in inappropriate scenarios.

Company Response and Legal Position

XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, other than an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".

A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to ban nudification software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and heavy penalties".

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

Regulator Stance and Tool Functionality

The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the potential" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.

Grok is a free AI assistant—with some premium features—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a post.

It is commonly used to give commentary or additional background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded picture through its AI image editing function.

History of Controversy and Rules

The tool has been faulted for allowing users to generate photos and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate content of celebrities.

"The platform has been allowing the production and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," the expert added.

XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "depicting likenesses of individuals in a sexually explicit way".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or share non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.

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