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The social media platform X has caused major anger after people utilized its AI chatbot Grok to alter photos of females by stripping their clothing.

Numerous cases have surfaced where the system has been employed to remove clothing from women to show them in bikinis without permission, as well as to place them in sexually explicit scenarios.

Developer Reaction and Legal Stance

XAI, the firm that created Grok, offered no comment to inquiries, other than an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".

A government spokesperson stated that legislation is being brought forward to outlaw nudification software. Under a proposed law, anyone who supplied such technology would "receive a jail term and heavy penalties".

"X or Grok is capable of halting these forms of misuse if they chose to," said a law professor, adding they "seem to have impunity."

Regulator Stance and Platform Functionality

The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the danger" of people seeing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was presently looking into X or Grok in concerning artificial intelligence images.

Grok is a no-cost AI assistant—with some additional functions—which answers X users' queries when they reference it in a tweet.

It is commonly used to provide reactions or more context to other users' comments, but people on X are also capable of edit an posted image through its artificial intelligence picture modification function.

History of Controversy and Rules

The tool has been faulted for permitting users to produce photos and clips with nudity and sexualised material, and it was in the past alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit material of celebrities.

"The platform has been permitting the generation and spread of these pictures for a long time without taking any steps and we have not seen any challenge by oversight bodies," the expert added.

XAI's own usage rules bans "portraying images of people in a pornographic fashion".

In a comment, Ofcom said it was illegal to "make or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and clarified this applied to explicit AI images created with AI.

It said services such as X were mandated to take "necessary actions" to "minimize the danger" of users encountering illegal content on their services and to remove it quickly when they are notified of it.