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The social media platform X has caused significant anger after users employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of females by stripping their attire.

Several cases have been seen where the system has been used to virtually strip female subjects to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.

Company Response and Regulatory Position

XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, except for an standard response stating "traditional news outlets lies".

A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to ban nudification technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "face a jail term and significant penalties".

"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."

Regulator Position and Tool Functionality

The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "assess the potential" of people accessing unlawful material on their services, but did not confirm whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.

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

It is frequently used to provide reactions or additional background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an posted picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.

History of Criticism and Policy

The tool has been faulted for allowing users to produce images and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in generating inappropriate content of celebrities.

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

XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing images of persons in a pornographic manner".

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

It said networks such as X were mandated to take "suitable measures" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to delete it swiftly when they become aware of it.