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Elon Musk's social media platform X has sparked widespread backlash after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of females by taking off their attire.

Multiple cases have emerged where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit situations.

Developer Reaction and Legal Stance

XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to questions, other than an automatically-generated message stating "traditional news outlets lies".

A government official stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw nudification technology. Under a new law, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a prison sentence and substantial penalties".

"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."

Oversight Body Stance and Tool Functionality

The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was presently examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.

Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they mention it in a message.

It is frequently used to offer commentary or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of alter an uploaded picture through its AI image editing function.

Background of Criticism and Rules

The tool has been criticised for permitting users to produce images and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past accused of making sexually explicit material of public figures.

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

XAI's own usage rules forbids "portraying images of people in a pornographic way".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or distribute non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.

It said services such as X were obligated to take "suitable actions" to "reduce the danger" of users viewing unlawful content on their services and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.