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Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked significant backlash after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of women by stripping their garments.

Multiple instances have surfaced where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear without consent, as well as to insert them in inappropriate contexts.

Company Response and Legal Stance

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

A Home Office official stated that new laws is being introduced to prohibit image stripping software. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a prison sentence and significant penalties".

"The platform is capable of halting these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."

Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities

The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "consider the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but did not specify whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.

Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which answers X users' prompts when they mention it in a post.

It is commonly used to provide commentary or more context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.

Background of Criticism and Rules

The tool has been criticised for allowing users to create images and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating graphic material of public figures.

"The platform has been allowing the generation and spread of these images for months without taking any action and we have yet to see any challenge by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.

XAI's own terms of service prohibits "portraying images of persons in a pornographic fashion".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or share deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.

It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to take down it swiftly when they are notified of it.