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Elon Musk's social media network X has sparked significant backlash after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by stripping their attire.

Multiple instances have been seen where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to make them appear in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in inappropriate scenarios.

Company Reaction and Legal Position

XAI, the company behind Grok, did not respond to inquiries, except for an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".

A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to prohibit nudification software. Under a new law, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and significant fines".

"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."

Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities

The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.

Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.

It is frequently used to provide reactions or more context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded image through its AI image editing tool.

Background of Criticism and Rules

The chatbot has been faulted for permitting users to create pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating inappropriate content of public figures.

"X has been allowing the generation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.

XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "depicting likenesses of persons in a pornographic manner".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.

It said services such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to delete it quickly when they are notified of it.