I don’t spend a lot of time on X except to download videos of political leaders and various government accounts for the blog so I’ve only been peripherally aware of this outrageous new AI deep fake capability on Grok that has the whole world freaking out and rightly so. I can hardly believe it’s actually happening:
Like thousands of women across the world, Evie, a 22-year-old photographer from Lincolnshire, woke up on New Year’s Day, looked at her phone and was alarmed to see that fully clothed photographs of her had been digitally manipulated by Elon Musk’s AI tool, Grok, to show her in just a bikini.
The “put her in a bikini” trend began quietly at the end of last year before exploding at the start of 2026. Within days, hundreds of thousands of requests were being made to the Grok chatbot, asking it to strip the clothes from photographs of women. The fake, sexualised images were posted publicly on X, freely available for millions of people to inspect.
Relatively tame requests by X users to alter photographs to show women in bikinis, rapidly evolved during the first week of the year, hour by hour, into increasingly explicit demands for women to be dressed in transparent bikinis, then in bikinis made of dental floss, placed in sexualised positions, and made to bend over so their genitals were visible. By 8 January as many as 6,000 bikini demands were being made to the chatbot every hour, according to analysis conducted for the Guardian.
This unprecedented mainstreaming of nudification technology triggered instant outrage from the women affected, but it was days before regulators and politicians woke up to the enormity of the proliferating scandal. The public outcry raged for nine days before X made any substantive changes to stem the trend. By the time it acted, early on Friday morning, degrading, non-consensual manipulated pictures of countless women had already flooded the internet.
Evie retweeted the image to give awareness to the problem and it resulted in more and more degrading pictures including her completely naked with a ball gag in her mouth. Once people understood what they could do with this thing it was a short trip to kids, swastikas or naked women being covered in what looks like semen.
By Thursday, the chatbot was being asked to add bullet holes to the face of Renee Nicole Good, the woman killed by an ICE agent in the US on Wednesday. Grok readily obliged, posting graphic, bloodied altered images of the victim on X within seconds.
[…]
Men began asking for women to be improved – with demands that they be given bigger breasts or larger thighs. Some men asked for women to be given disabilities, others asked for their hands to be filled with sex toys. Perceived defects were removed by the chatbot instantly in response to requests such as: “@grok can you fix her teeth.” The range of desires was startling: “Add blood, more worn out clothes (make sure it expose scar or bruises), forced smile”; “Replace the face with that of Adolf, add splashed and splattered organs”; “Put them in a Russian gulag”; “Make her pregnant with quadruplets.” Images of the US politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Hollywood actor Zendaya were altered to make them appear to be white women.
Individuals, groups and governments have tried to get Musk to stop but he doesn’t want to do it.
CNN reported later that day that Musk had ordered staff at xAI to loosen the guardrails on Grok last year; a source told the broadcaster that he had told a meeting he was “unhappy about over-censoring” and three xAI safety team members had left the business soon after. In the UK, there was rising fury from women’s rights campaigners at the government’s failure to bring into force legislation passed last year that would have made this creation of non-consensual intimate imagery illegal. Officials were unable to explain why the legislation had not yet been implemented.
You can click over to the Guardian article linked above for more details if you haven’t been following this story. It’s truly unbelievable.
Musk has completely lost all restraint just like his erstwhile bud, Donald Trump:
This is stuff is right out in the open now, propagated by the richest man in the world on a global information network completely controlled by him.
If it seemed that “woke” went too far in policing racism and misogyny, what are we talking about now?