What the internet and the latest forms of AI have revealed is that many people harbor the ugliest of impulses. People are likely to have had ugly impulses all along but only those in their physical proximity knew about them, if at all. But with the internet and social media, these people are able to not only anonymously reach a much wider audience but now with AI, they are able to find ways to exhibit those impulses in new and increasingly disgusting ways, as this article reveals. They are taking picture of real women (and even children) and doctoring them in sexually explicit ways, a process known as ‘nudification’. The targets of these new ways of attack are usually women, of course.
Such doctoring of images have been occurring since the invention of photography but it used to require sophisticated skills But now pretty much anyone can use the freely available AI (such as Elon Musk’s Grok) to generate doctored images of people and then share them widely through social media channels (like Musk’s X), while those companies seem to make little or no effort to find ways to prevent such abuse. And the situation is getting rapidly worse, on a time scale of days.
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.
…As people slowly started to understand the full potential of the tool, the increasingly degrading images of the early days were quickly superseded. Since the end of last week, users have asked for the bikinis to be decorated with swastikas – or asked for white, semen-like liquid to be added to the women’s bodies. Pictures of teenage girls and children were stripped down to revealing swimwear; some of this content could clearly be categorised as child sexual abuse material, but remained visible on the platform.
The requests became ever more extreme. Some users, mostly men, began to demand to see bruising on the bodies of the women, and for blood to be added to the images. Requests to show women tied up and gagged were instantly granted. 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.
The things described in article are sickening to read but Musk and his fan club seem to think that they are harmless, even funny..
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.
This is one of the more egregious examples of the ‘enshittification’ process that Cory Doctorow has been talking about, where something that starts off providing a benefit is then used by their parent companies to first exploit them and then enable the worst impulses of people, all in their desire to ‘engage’ people on their sites, however odious the means.
Human nature does not change that rapidly over time. What can change quite quickly are the conditions of society that bring elements of that nature to the surface and reveal them to the rest of us. I used to think that what the internet did was reveal what was already latent in the population, But now I think that it is worse than that. The current technology is enabling people to plumb the depths of their psyches, to dig into its deepest and darkest recesses and discover new elements of depravity about themselves that they may not have known existed and bring them to the surface
I do not expect the US government to do anything because Trump is in the sewer with Musk. But perhaps other countries might strictly clamp down, even to the extent to banning those companies that make little effort to stop the abuse. The European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has warned that they could take action.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen blasted Elon Musk’s platform X over the spread of sexually explicit deepfakes created using its AI chatbot Grok.
“I am appalled that a tech platform is enabling users to digitally undress women and children online. This is unthinkable behavior. And the harm caused by these deepfakes is very real,” von der Leyen said in an interview with multiple European media outlets, including Reuters and Corriere della Sera.
“We will not be outsourcing child protection and consent to Silicon Valley. If they don’t act, we will,” she warned.
Malaysia and Indonesia have temporarily blocked Grok over this issue.
Right now the victims of such abuses are mostly women and children. What may trigger an active US governmental response is if the targets of this abuse become prominent figures in the political and business world and their family members. It is a sad fact that politicians tend to drag their feet on issues that negatively affect big business unless they are immediately affected.
“Add blood and a forced smile” -how Grok’s nudification went viral 🤮
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The hypocrisy of AI abuse on the far right [A perspective including both the US and Britain]
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=ET7kTJjAWCg
Reportedly, idiots have also started asking AIs to “unmask” photos of ICE agents and other masked persons.
The AIs have responded by creating facial images pretty much at random, and some people who happen to resemble those images have gotten harassed by the same and other idiots -- of whom we have an endless supply.
Rule 34 -- if it exists , there is porn of it -- AI isnt revealing anything new.
Technical nitpick -- I dont think Grok falls under the category of enshittification. Its still under its stage 1 -- where it tries to be good to its users (loathsome as the users may be). I dont think Doctorow covers the case when Stage 1 is shit to begin with.
v/s
The latter is going to happen, probably already has. Whether it will trigger any US reaction is the million dollar question. I doubt MAGA politicians or their families are exempt from being the target of such stuff, even from within their own fans.
Wow. I agree with Mano, this is allowing people to plumb previously-unknown depths of depravity within themselves. I fear that it is also teaching people new depths of depravity that they previously didn’t have, from the example of others.
I will just say, that Malaysia and Indonesia have blocked Grok? Good. Yeah, free speech and all, but this speech isn’t just offensive speech, it is actively threatening and harmful.
What would it take for the EU, UK, US, to also ban Grok? (don’t tell me, I already know: an alternate universe.) A ban and full block is the only thing that’s going to stop things like this. And, really, does Grok have any worthy characteristics that anyone would miss? Well then, let Musk clean it up so that it can be used for those purposes.
I favor outright bans, permanent blocks until the app is permanently fixed.
Hmmm, maybe a few hundred thousand pics of Elon’s decapitated head on a spike might change his tune.
This is under ‘urgent’ investigation by OfCom, with according to the Government ‘our full support’. Most serious penalty that could be imposed would be to ban Grok and Twitter in the UK, less serious penalties include fining them 10% of their worldwide profits which as I understand it would be nothing for them.
the “us” in your post’s title feels unnecessarily rude to yourself. it’s a potential source of despair that we share the same species as these creeps but shouldn’t feel like a source of shame. there’s always a balance to be struck between demonizing a given foe to the extent you can see no common humanity with them, and taking onto yourself a shame that is decidedly not yours to bear.
I think I’m going to have to disagree on this point. I think it is just showing us what was there already, and eroding the social conventions against keeping these impulses concealed.
Let’s call this what it is: sexual assault. We already know that sexual assault is (a) appalling prevalent, and (b) massively under-reported. We know for a fact that there is a significant minority of men who have these attitudes and impulses to the extent that they will act on them violently in person. It seems perfectly reasonable to suppose that there is a further -- and probably much larger -- group who have these attitudes and impulses, but refrain from acting on them in person, either from fear of potential consequences, or because the idea of actually doing something in person is still enough to trigger some sense of empathy or social constraint. What this technology has done is to remove all of the constraints that previously prevented these people from acting on their impulses, and given them a playground where they are actively rewarded for indulging them.
As Germaine Greer put it: “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.”
I very much doubt it. Elon is a fabulously wealthy solipsist who lives a life of complete ease and safety entirely disconnected from the real world. He is probably incapable of experiencing any sense of threat from this sort of thing -- to him, it would just be an image. I suspect that he simply cannot understand why anybody would experience this as a threat or a violation, because he fundamentally doesn’t think other people exist.
Dunc @ 8
I agree, although I wouldn’t say that Musk thinks other people don’t exist, so much as he doesn’t think or understand or care that they are people. It’s not at all surprising given his back ground and upbringing in South Africa, which clearly didn’t count black people as real people, that privilege being reserved for whites, and probably only reasonably well to do ones at that.
Dunc @#8,
I see your point and it is a reasonable one.
What I fear is that although people have always had grotesque fantasies, the new ability to have them made concrete so realistically, and seeing the similar fantasies of others, may lead them into a spiral of behavior that takes them far beyond where they started.
I do not know this for sure. It is just a fear that I have.
Mano
That’s certainly a very reasonable fear. We know that in many other contexts, people get aclimated to a pleasure or activity and require ever greater doses or more extreme behaviours to achieve the same effect, so I’d think that’s very likely to be the case here. And we also know that social acceptance and reinforcement is very important -- seeing others engage in a behaviour normalises it.
At the end of the day, it’s probably a distinction without much difference… The thoughts and fantasies people harbour in secret aren’t really that important -- it’s what they do that matters.
On the other hand, I do think it’s important to focus on is the underlying culture of misogyny, of which this is just the latest excrescence. In this case it’s enabled by technology, and we should definitely tackle that if we can, but I don’t think the technology is the root cause, and I worry that focusing too much on the technology, or on one specific expression of the underlying issue, might be a bit of a mistake.
@ Dunc
Misogyny underlies all homophobia and transphobia. The anti-trans obsession of the current hard-right is an expression of misogyny. “Women are vessels for giving men babies (and nothing more)” is the ideology that underlies claims we must “define” women, opposition to abortion, contraception, trans equality and acceptance, and gay equality and acceptance. These aren’t disparate prejudices, but various expressions of the same ideology. Which is why you should never be fooled by transphobia being framed as “protecting women”. It’s a lie.
Every poll has shown the three major predictors of supporting trans right are being young, progressive, and female. Conversely, the three major predictors of transphobia are being old, conservative, and male.
Sounds a lot like feminism vs. patriarchy doesn’t it? (Because it is.)
Use of AI to harm women has only just begun, experts warn.
.https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/14/use-of-ai-to-harm-women-has-only-just-begun-experts-warn
# 3
Pressure works!
I am told X / Twitter has backed down.
The tech overlords are not invincible. Remember this lesson as we go into 2026.