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Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked major anger after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter images of females by stripping their garments.

Numerous instances have emerged where the technology has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to show them in swimwear without permission, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.

Company Response and Legal Stance

XAI, the organization behind Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".

A government representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw image stripping software. Under a upcoming law, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a prison sentence and heavy penalties".

"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."

Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities

The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.

Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional features—which responds to X users' requests when they reference it in a post.

It is commonly used to offer reactions or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.

Background of Criticism and Policy

The tool has been condemned for allowing users to create photos and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit content of celebrities.

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

XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting images of individuals in a pornographic way".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or circulate deepfakes or illegal content" and stated this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.

It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "suitable actions" to "lessen the danger" of users viewing illegal material on their services and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.