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Elon Musk's online network X has provoked significant anger after people employed its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate pictures of females by stripping their clothing.

Several examples have emerged where the system has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to make them appear in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexually explicit contexts.

Company Response and Legal Stance

XAI, the company behind Grok, offered no comment to questions, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".

A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being introduced to outlaw image stripping software. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a prison sentence and heavy penalties".

"The platform could prevent these types of abuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."

Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality

The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the potential" of people seeing unlawful material on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence images.

Grok is a free chatbot—with some additional functions—which answers X users' queries when they reference it in a post.

It is often used to offer commentary or further background to other posters' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded photo through its AI image editing tool.

History of Controversy and Rules

The system has been criticised for enabling users to generate photos and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past accused of making graphic material of celebrities.

"The platform has been enabling the generation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any action by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.

XAI's own terms of service forbids "showing likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit way".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images created with AI.

It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "necessary steps" to "lessen the danger" of users coming across unlawful material on their services and to delete it swiftly when they are notified of it.