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Elon Musk's social media network X has caused major backlash after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change photos of women by taking off their clothing.

Several instances have surfaced where the system has been used to digitally undress women to render them in bikinis without permission, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.

Company Response and Regulatory Position

XAI, the company responsible for Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".

A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who distributed such technology would "be subject to a jail term and significant penalties".

"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy impunity."

Regulator Position and Platform Capabilities

The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "evaluate the risk" of people accessing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was currently examining X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.

Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional features—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.

It is frequently used to give commentary or further background to other users' comments, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded picture through its AI image editing tool.

Background of Criticism and Rules

The system has been condemned for allowing users to produce pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making graphic material of celebrities.

"The platform has been permitting the production and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," the expert added.

XAI's own terms of service prohibits "depicting likenesses of individuals in a pornographic manner".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this included explicit AI images made with AI.

It said networks such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the danger" of users encountering unlawful content on their services and to remove it quickly when they learn of it.