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Elon Musk's online platform X has provoked major anger after users used its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by removing their garments.

Several cases have been seen where the system has been used to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in sexualized contexts.

Developer Reaction and Legal Position

XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to questions, other than an auto-reply message stating "legacy media lies".

A Home Office spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw nudification tools. Under a upcoming criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "face a prison sentence and heavy penalties".

"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."

Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities

The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their platforms, but stopped short of confirming whether it was presently examining X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.

Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' requests when they mention it in a message.

It is often used to give reactions or more background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can modify an uploaded photo through its AI image editing feature.

History of Criticism and Policy

The tool has been condemned for permitting users to generate pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier alleged to have been involved in generating sexually explicit material of public figures.

"X has been enabling the creation and distribution of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.

XAI's own acceptable use policy forbids "depicting images of people in a pornographic manner".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this covered explicit AI images generated with AI.

It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary actions" to "lessen the risk" of users coming across unlawful material on their platforms and to take down it swiftly when they are notified of it.