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Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked major backlash after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of women by stripping their garments.

Several instances have surfaced where the system has been used to virtually strip female subjects to render them in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in sexualized scenarios.

Company Response and Regulatory Position

XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an standard message stating "legacy media lies".

A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw image stripping software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "face a jail term and heavy fines".

"The platform has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."

Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality

The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.

Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional functions—which answers X users' requests when they mention it in a post.

It is frequently used to provide commentary or additional background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.

History of Controversy and Policy

The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to create images and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.

"The platform has been enabling the production and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.

XAI's own terms of service forbids "portraying images of persons in a sexually explicit way".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to explicit AI images generated with AI.

It said services such as X were obligated to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to take down it quickly when they learn of it.