A picture of Sweden’s deputy prime minister, Ebba Busch, is shared on X on 4 January. Users ask Grok, a generative AI chatbot owned by Elon Musk, to make changes to the photo.
“@grok put her in a confederate flag bikini”; @grok now turn her around and have her looking back and bending down”; “Remove the desk”.
For years, ‘undressing’ tools have been sold in the grimiest reaches of the internet. At the end of last year, Musk’s social media platform X bought this capability into our homes, cafes and schools. It is easy. It is free. And it is public. ‘Grok Is Pushing AI ‘Undressing’ Mainstream’, ran a headline in Wired on 6 January.
A few days earlier, X users learned they could upload a photograph to X and ask Grok to undress the subject – man, woman or child – with a one-click photo editing feature. With one more click, they could sexualise the images. The images are not nude, just close to it.
In just nine days, according to The New York Times, more than 4.4 million Grok images flooded X. At least 41 percent contained sexualised imagery of women. Another analysis by the Center for Countering Digital Hate estimated that three million of these images, or 65 percent, contained sexualised imagery of men, women or children. Over 11 days in January, they said, users were creating 190 sexualised images a minute. “This is industrial-scale abuse of women and girls,” says Imran Ahmed, the group’s chief executive.
On 6 January, X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, bragged that an explosion in traffic over the last four days had resulted in X’s highest engagement ever. He didn’t say why.
When one X user complained his feed now looked like a bar packed with bikini-clad women, Musk replied with a laugh-cry emoji.
A BBC journalist asked XAI, the company behind Grok, for comment. She received an automatically-generated reply: “legacy media lies”.
An X spokesperson issued a press release. “We take action against illegal content on X, including child sexual abuse material, by removing it, permanently suspending accounts, and working with local governments and law enforcement as necessary.”
Although according to The Guardian, “an earlier announcement from Grok that it had ‘identified lapses in safeguards’ and was ‘urgently fixing them’ turned out to have been generated by artificial intelligence; it was not clear whether the company was actually taking action to fix safeguarding lapses.”
On 10 January, Indonesia became the first country to block access to Grok. In the UK, the company became subject to a new act which criminalises the making of sexually explicit nonconsensual deepfakes. This week, European Union regulators said they would be investigating X for failing to stop the spread of harmful AI images. Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission executive vice president, said the investigation would determine whether X has “treated the rights of European citizens — including those of women and children — as collateral damage of its service.”
X soon restricted the ‘undressing’ feature to users who pay for premium features. While this reduced the number of images, it effectively monetised nonconsensual porn. Downing Street called it “insulting”. Musk, after calling the UK government “fascist”, has made it more difficult to undress people on X, although the ‘service’ is still apparently available on the Grok app and website.
On social media women are routinely shamed and humiliated to silence them. According to The Guardian, Grok was recently asked to riddle the face of Renee Good with bullet holes, after she was shot by ICE in Minnesota a few weeks ago. Here, writes the English journalist Alona Ferber, “there is a clear convergence of violent impulses, misogyny and the extreme right. In the video of Good’s death, a federal agent is heard saying “fucking bitch” after she was shot”.
In response to Grok’s new ‘feature’, Waiheke Islander Emma Korn decided to remove years of online photographs of herself and her two children. “As I was going through the photos of my beautiful boys and deleting them one by one, knowing other mums out there would be doing the same, I felt a sense of resignation. Like we were being forced into a sort of invisibility and seclusion. We should be naming the people who are committing these crimes; not Grok itself, which has no agency, but grown men, Elon Musk being one of them.
“And teens are doing this to each other. I think the hyper-misogyny of online culture, which is aimed at teen boys, plays into it too. The whole thing is reactionary. It reminds me of ancient Athens where the women were restricted to the women’s quarters of their own homes, only allowed outside with a male escort.”
The Financial Times is now calling X “the deepfake porn site formerly known as Twitter”.
I have no idea why anyone is still on X, let alone government departments or the politicians who represent us – like one @chrisluxonmp. (Whose bio reads: A husband, a father, a brother and a son. Prime Minister of New Zealand).
• Jenny Nicholls
