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Elon Musk's social media network X has provoked significant outrage after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by taking off their garments.

Several examples have emerged where the system has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate contexts.

Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance

XAI, the company that created Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".

A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such tools would "receive a jail term and heavy penalties".

"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."

Regulator Stance and Tool Capabilities

The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "assess the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time examining X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence pictures.

Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.

It is frequently used to give reactions or additional context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can edit an posted picture through its AI image editing feature.

Background of Controversy and Policy

The tool has been condemned for allowing users to create images and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of making inappropriate material of celebrities.

"X has been permitting the generation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.

XAI's own usage rules bans "showing images of individuals in a graphic manner".

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

It said services such as X were required to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.