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The social media platform X has sparked widespread backlash after individuals employed its AI chatbot Grok to change images of women by stripping their attire.

Numerous cases have been seen where the tool has been employed to digitally undress women to show them in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.

Company Reaction and Regulatory Stance

XAI, the organization behind Grok, offered no comment to requests for comment, except for an automatically-generated response stating "legacy media lies".

A government representative stated that new laws is being brought forward to ban nudification tools. Under a new criminal offence, anyone who provided such technology would "be subject to a jail term and substantial fines".

"The platform has the ability to stop these forms of abuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have impunity."

Oversight Body Stance and Platform Functionality

The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "consider the danger" of people accessing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently examining X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.

Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium functions—which answers X users' requests when they tag it in a post.

It is commonly used to give commentary or additional context to other users' comments, but people on X are also can edit an uploaded picture through its AI image editing tool.

Background of Controversy and Policy

The tool has been condemned for enabling users to produce photos and clips with explicit content and sexually suggestive material, and it was earlier accused of making sexually explicit material of celebrities.

"X has been permitting the creation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not witnessed any intervention by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.

XAI's own usage rules bans "portraying images of individuals in a pornographic manner".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "create or share deepfakes or child sexual abuse material" and confirmed this applied to sexual deepfakes generated with AI.

It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate actions" to "minimize the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to delete it promptly when they are notified of it.