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The online platform X has sparked significant anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to change images of females by removing their clothing.

Multiple examples have emerged where the system has been used to remove clothing from female subjects to make them appear in swimwear without permission, as well as to insert them in sexualized situations.

Company Reaction and Legal Position

XAI, the organization behind Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, other than an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".

A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being introduced to prohibit image stripping software. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "receive a prison sentence and substantial penalties".

"The platform could prevent these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."

Oversight Body Position and Tool Functionality

The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.

Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some paid-for features—which answers X users' queries when they mention it in a post.

It is often used to give commentary or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.

History of Controversy and Policy

The chatbot has been condemned for enabling users to create pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in making inappropriate content of public figures.

"X has been allowing the generation and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any measures and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," Professor McGlynn added.

XAI's own usage rules forbids "depicting likenesses of people in a graphic manner".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "create or distribute deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.

It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "appropriate steps" to "lessen the danger" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to delete it swiftly when they learn of it.