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The social media platform X has provoked major anger after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter pictures of women by stripping their clothing.

Several instances have surfaced where the system has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to make them appear in bikinis without consent, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.

Company Reaction and Legal Stance

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

A government official stated that legislation is being proposed to outlaw image stripping tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy penalties".

"X or Grok could prevent these forms of misuse if they wanted 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 potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.

Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they tag it in a post.

It is commonly used to offer commentary or more background to other users' comments, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.

History of Criticism and Policy

The tool has been condemned for enabling users to produce photos and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making graphic material of public figures.

"X has been allowing the creation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any intervention by regulators," the expert added.

XAI's own acceptable use policy bans "showing images of persons in a graphic way".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "generate or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this included sexual deepfakes created with AI.

It said services such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they become aware of it.