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The social media platform X has sparked major backlash after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by stripping their clothing.

Numerous instances have surfaced where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in sexualized scenarios.

Company Response and Regulatory Stance

XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an standard response stating "legacy media lies".

A government official stated that legislation is being brought forward to prohibit nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such technology would "receive a jail term and substantial fines".

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

Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities

The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in regarding AI-generated images.

Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional features—which reacts to X users' queries when they mention it in a tweet.

It is often used to give reactions or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification feature.

History of Criticism and Policy

The chatbot has been condemned for allowing users to generate photos and videos with explicit content and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously accused of making graphic material of celebrities.

"The platform has been enabling the production and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.

XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting likenesses of people in a sexually explicit fashion".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images made with AI.

It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across illegal material on their platforms and to remove it quickly when they learn of it.