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Elon Musk's online platform X has caused widespread backlash after users used its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of females by removing their clothing.

Numerous instances have surfaced where the system has been used to virtually strip women to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.

Developer Reaction and Legal Position

XAI, the organization that created Grok, did not respond to questions, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".

A government representative stated that new laws is being introduced to ban nudification technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a prison sentence and significant fines".

"The platform could prevent these forms of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."

Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality

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

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

It is frequently used to give commentary or additional context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.

History of Criticism and Rules

The system has been condemned for enabling users to produce images and footage with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in making sexually explicit material of celebrities.

"The platform has been permitting the production and sharing of these images for months without taking any action and we have not seen any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.

XAI's own usage rules forbids "portraying likenesses of individuals in a pornographic manner".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.

It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable steps" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.