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Elon Musk's social media platform X has caused significant outrage after individuals used its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate images of women by stripping their attire.

Multiple examples have emerged where the system has been employed to virtually strip women to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.

Developer Response and Regulatory Stance

XAI, the organization that created Grok, did not respond to questions, other than an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".

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

"The platform is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."

Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality

The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.

Grok is a free chatbot—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.

It is often used to provide reactions or more background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to edit an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.

Background of Controversy and Policy

The system has been faulted for allowing users to produce pictures and footage with nudity and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of creating inappropriate content of celebrities.

"The platform has been enabling the creation and distribution 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 acceptable use policy prohibits "portraying images of people in a graphic manner".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.

It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to remove it promptly when they are notified of it.