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The online platform X has sparked major backlash after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of women by stripping their attire.

Numerous examples have surfaced where the tool has been employed to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexually explicit contexts.

Developer Reaction and Legal Position

XAI, the company responsible for Grok, did not respond to inquiries, aside from an standard message stating "legacy media lies".

A Home Office representative stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such tools would "be subject to a jail term and substantial penalties".

"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."

Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality

The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.

Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium features—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a message.

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

History of Criticism and Rules

The system has been criticised for enabling users to create photos and footage with nudity and sexualised content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating graphic content of public figures.

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

XAI's own usage rules forbids "showing likenesses of persons in a graphic manner".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "create or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images made with AI.

It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering illegal material on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they are notified of it.