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The online network X has sparked widespread outrage after individuals employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change pictures of females by removing their attire.

Numerous instances have emerged where the technology has been used to virtually strip women to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to put them in sexualized contexts.

Developer Reaction and Legal Stance

XAI, the company responsible for Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".

A government spokesperson stated that new laws is being proposed to outlaw image stripping technology. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a jail term and heavy penalties".

"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they desired to," said a law professor, adding they "operate with impunity."

Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities

The communications watchdog Ofcom said platforms must "consider the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their networks, but did not specify whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in regarding AI-generated pictures.

Grok is a free AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which reacts to X users' requests when they tag it in a tweet.

It is often used to provide commentary or more background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also capable of modify an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification tool.

Background of Criticism and Policy

The chatbot has been faulted for allowing users to generate photos and footage with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was earlier accused of creating graphic content of public figures.

"X has been permitting the production and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have not seen any intervention by oversight bodies," the expert added.

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

In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and clarified this included explicit AI images generated with AI.

It said services such as X were required to take "necessary steps" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering unlawful material on their services and to take down it promptly when they learn of it.