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The social media network X has caused significant anger after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of females by taking off their attire.

Several cases have emerged where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.

Company Reaction and Legal Stance

XAI, the organization that created Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".

A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a jail term and substantial fines".

"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."

Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities

The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the potential" of people accessing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.

Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' requests when they reference it in a tweet.

It is commonly used to provide commentary or more context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.

Background of Controversy and Rules

The chatbot has been faulted for enabling users to create pictures and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of creating inappropriate content of celebrities.

"The platform has been enabling the generation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any action by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.

XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "depicting images of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or share non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this covered sexual deepfakes made with AI.

It said networks such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to remove it swiftly when they become aware of it.