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Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked major backlash after individuals used its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of women by taking off their garments.

Multiple cases have emerged where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in inappropriate situations.

Company Response and Legal Stance

XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, except for an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".

A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a jail term and heavy fines".

"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."

Oversight Body Position and Platform Capabilities

The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the danger" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.

Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional features—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a message.

It is frequently used to provide commentary or further background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.

Background of Controversy and Policy

The system has been faulted for enabling users to generate photos and videos with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of creating sexually explicit content of public figures.

"X has been permitting the generation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.

XAI's own terms of service prohibits "portraying likenesses of individuals in a pornographic way".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or circulate non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and clarified this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.

It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to remove it promptly when they become aware of it.