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The online platform X has caused significant anger after users used its AI chatbot Grok to manipulate photos of females by taking off their attire.

Several cases have surfaced where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.

Company Response and Legal Position

XAI, the organization that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, except for an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".

A government representative stated that legislation is being brought forward to ban image stripping technology. Under a new law, anyone who supplied such technology would "face a jail term and significant fines".

"X or Grok is capable of halting these types of misuse if they wanted to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."

Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities

The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people accessing illegal content on their services, but did not confirm whether it was currently investigating X or Grok in relation to AI-generated images.

Grok is a free AI assistant—with some additional features—which responds to X users' requests when they tag it in a post.

It is frequently used to provide commentary or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of alter an posted picture through its AI image editing feature.

Background of Criticism and Policy

The system has been faulted for enabling users to produce pictures and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of creating inappropriate material of celebrities.

"The platform has been permitting the creation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," the expert added.

XAI's own terms of service forbids "depicting images of individuals in a pornographic fashion".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "generate or circulate non-consensual intimate images or illegal content" and stated this covered explicit AI images created with AI.

It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary measures" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it promptly when they become aware of it.