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The social media network X has provoked significant anger after people used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of women by removing their garments.

Multiple instances have emerged where the system has been used to remove clothing from women to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized situations.

Company Reaction and Legal Position

XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".

A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping technology. Under a upcoming law, anyone who distributed such technology would "receive a prison sentence and significant fines".

"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."

Oversight Body Position and Platform Functionality

The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their services, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently examining X or Grok in relation to artificial intelligence images.

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

It is frequently used to give commentary or further background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.

Background of Controversy and Policy

The chatbot has been criticised for enabling users to create images and videos with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit material of public figures.

"The platform has been permitting the production and sharing of these images for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.

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

In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes created with AI.

It said networks such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing unlawful material on their services and to take down it promptly when they become aware of it.