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Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked widespread anger after people used its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of women by removing their clothing.

Numerous cases have been seen where the system has been used to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in swimwear without consent, as well as to put them in inappropriate scenarios.

Company Response and Regulatory Position

XAI, the firm that created Grok, remained silent to questions, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".

A Home Office spokesperson stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification technology. Under a proposed law, anyone who provided such tools would "be subject to a jail term and substantial fines".

"X or Grok could prevent these forms of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with impunity."

Regulator Position and Tool Capabilities

The communications watchdog Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the risk" of people viewing illegal content on their networks, but did not confirm whether it was currently examining X or Grok in concerning AI-generated pictures.

Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some premium features—which reacts to X users' prompts when they tag it in a post.

It is often used to offer reactions or more context to other posters' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an uploaded photo through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.

History of Criticism and Rules

The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to create images and clips with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of generating inappropriate content of celebrities.

"X has been allowing the creation and sharing of these images for a long time without taking any action and we have yet to see any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.

XAI's own usage rules prohibits "showing images of persons in a sexually explicit way".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "make or circulate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to sexual deepfakes made with AI.

It said platforms such as X were mandated to take "necessary actions" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal material on their services and to take down it quickly when they are notified of it.