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The social media platform X has provoked major anger after users utilized its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate photos of women by taking off their garments.

Several cases have surfaced where the technology has been employed to virtually strip female subjects to render them in bikinis without consent, as well as to place them in sexualized contexts.

Developer Reaction and Regulatory Stance

XAI, the firm behind Grok, remained silent to requests for comment, aside from an auto-reply response stating "traditional news outlets lies".

A Home Office official stated that legislation is being introduced to ban nudification tools. Under a new law, anyone who provided such tools would "face a jail term and heavy penalties".

"X or Grok has the ability to stop these types of misuse if they chose to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "operate with a lack of consequences."

Oversight Body Position and Tool Capabilities

The regulator Ofcom said technology companies must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing unlawful material on their platforms, but did not confirm whether it was currently examining X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.

Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some paid-for features—which responds to X users' prompts when they tag it in a post.

It is commonly used to provide reactions or more background to other posters' comments, but people on X are also able to modify an uploaded image through its AI image editing function.

Background of Criticism and Policy

The chatbot has been criticised for permitting users to produce images and videos with explicit content and sexualised content, and it was previously accused of making inappropriate material of celebrities.

"The platform has been permitting the production and sharing of these pictures for months without taking any steps and we have not witnessed any action by regulators," the expert added.

XAI's own terms of service bans "portraying likenesses of persons in a sexually explicit fashion".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.

It said services such as X were mandated to take "appropriate measures" to "minimize the risk" of users coming across illegal material on their services and to remove it quickly when they learn of it.