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The online platform X has caused significant backlash after people utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to alter photos of females by stripping their clothing.

Multiple instances have surfaced where the technology has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to show them in swimwear without permission, as well as to place them in inappropriate contexts.

Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance

XAI, the organization responsible for Grok, remained silent to questions, except for an standard message stating "legacy media lies".

A Home Office official stated that new laws is being proposed to prohibit image stripping tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who supplied such tools would "face a jail term and significant penalties".

"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of abuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."

Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality

The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the potential" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not specify whether it was presently examining X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.

Grok is a no-cost artificial intelligence—with some premium features—which responds to X users' queries when they tag it in a tweet.

It is often used to give reactions or more background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded picture through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.

Background of Controversy and Policy

The system has been condemned for enabling users to produce pictures and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit material of public figures.

"The platform has been permitting the production and sharing of these images for months without taking any action and we have not witnessed any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.

XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing images of persons in a graphic manner".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or share deepfakes or illegal content" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images created with AI.

It said platforms such as X were obligated to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across illegal content on their services and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.