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Elon Musk's online network X has sparked widespread anger after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of females by stripping their attire.

Several cases have been seen where the system has been used to digitally undress women to show them in swimwear without permission, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.

Company Response and Legal Position

XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".

A government representative stated that new laws is being proposed to ban nudification tools. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such tools would "face a prison sentence and substantial fines".

"The platform could prevent these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."

Regulator Position and Platform Functionality

The regulator Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was presently examining X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.

Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional features—which answers X users' queries when they tag it in a post.

It is often used to provide commentary or additional context to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also capable of alter an uploaded photo through its AI image editing feature.

History of Criticism and Rules

The tool has been criticised for enabling users to generate images and videos with nudity and sexualised material, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit content of public figures.

"The platform has been allowing the production and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," the expert added.

XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting images of people in a pornographic manner".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or circulate private pictures or illegal content" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.

It said platforms such as X were required to take "necessary measures" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering illegal material on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they become aware of it.