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Elon Musk's online platform X has sparked widespread backlash after users used its AI chatbot Grok to change pictures of females by taking off their attire.

Several examples have been seen where the technology has been used to digitally undress women to render them in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to insert them in inappropriate scenarios.

Company Reaction and Legal Stance

XAI, the firm responsible for Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated response stating "traditional news outlets lies".

A Home Office official stated that new laws is being introduced to ban nudification technology. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who provided such tools would "face a prison sentence and heavy fines".

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

Oversight Body Stance and Platform Capabilities

The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "evaluate the risk" of people seeing illegal content on their services, but did not specify whether it was at this time investigating X or Grok in regarding artificial intelligence pictures.

Grok is a no-cost chatbot—with some additional features—which answers X users' requests when they reference it in a post.

It is often used to provide commentary or further context to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an posted photo through its AI image editing function.

History of Criticism and Rules

The chatbot has been criticised for allowing users to create images and footage with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in making sexually explicit content of public figures.

"The platform has been permitting the creation and spread of these images for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any action by oversight bodies," the expert added.

XAI's own usage rules bans "showing likenesses of people in a pornographic manner".

In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or distribute private pictures or illegal content" and stated this included explicit AI images generated with AI.

It said services such as X were required to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the risk" of users viewing unlawful content on their platforms and to delete it quickly when they learn of it.