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The social media platform X has sparked widespread outrage after individuals used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate images of women by removing their attire.

Numerous cases have been seen where the technology has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in inappropriate contexts.

Developer Reaction and Regulatory Position

XAI, the firm behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, aside from an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".

A government representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "face a prison sentence and heavy fines".

"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."

Regulator Position and Platform Functionality

The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the risk" of people viewing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently investigating X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.

Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' prompts when they reference it in a tweet.

It is commonly used to give reactions or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.

History of Controversy and Rules

The system has been faulted for enabling users to create images and clips with nudity and sexualised content, and it was in the past accused of creating inappropriate content of public figures.

"X has been allowing the generation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," the expert added.

XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing images of individuals in a pornographic manner".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered explicit AI images created with AI.

It said services such as X were obligated to take "appropriate actions" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across unlawful material on their services and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.