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Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked significant backlash after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of women by taking off their clothing.

Several examples have emerged where the system has been used to virtually strip women to show them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit situations.

Company Response and Regulatory Position

XAI, the company that created Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".

A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban nudification technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a prison sentence and heavy fines".

"X or Grok could prevent these types of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."

Regulator Position and Platform Functionality

The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the potential" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence pictures.

Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium features—which answers X users' queries when they tag it in a message.

It is often used to give reactions or further background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can edit an posted image through its AI image editing function.

History of Controversy and Rules

The system has been criticised for permitting users to create images and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was previously accused of generating inappropriate content of celebrities.

"The platform has been allowing the creation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.

XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "portraying likenesses of individuals in a pornographic fashion".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included explicit AI images made with AI.

It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the danger" of users viewing illegal material on their platforms and to remove it swiftly when they learn of it.