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The social media platform X has provoked significant anger after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of women by removing their attire.

Numerous instances have been seen where the system has been used to virtually strip women to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in inappropriate situations.

Developer Response and Regulatory Position

XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an standard message stating "legacy media lies".

A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and significant penalties".

"X or Grok has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."

Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality

The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the danger" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.

Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some additional functions—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a message.

It is commonly used to provide reactions or additional background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.

Background of Criticism and Rules

The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to create images and footage with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of generating inappropriate content of celebrities.

"The platform has been enabling the production and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," the expert added.

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

In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.

It said platforms such as X were required to take "appropriate measures" to "lessen the risk" of users encountering illegal material on their platforms and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.