Earlier this week, some individuals on X started replying to pictures with a really particular type of request. “Put her in a bikini,” “take her gown off,” “unfold her legs,” and so forth, they commanded Grok, the platform’s built-in chatbot. Repeatedly, the bot complied, utilizing pictures of actual individuals—celebrities and noncelebrities, together with some who seem like younger youngsters—and placing them in bikinis, revealing underwear, or sexual poses. By one estimateGrok generated one nonconsensual sexual picture each minute in a roughly 24-hour stretch.
Though the attain of those posts is tough to measure, some have been favored hundreds of occasions. X seems to have eliminated a variety of these pictures and suspended not less than one person who requested for them, however many, a lot of them are nonetheless seen. xAI, the Elon Musk–owned firm that develops Grok, prohibits the sexualization of youngsters in its acceptable-use coverage; neither the protection nor child-safety groups on the firm responded to an in depth request for remark. Once I despatched an electronic mail to the xAI media workforce, I obtained a normal reply: “Legacy Media Lies.”
Musk, who additionally didn’t reply to my request for remark, doesn’t seem involved. As all of this was unfolding, he posted a number of jokes about the issue: requesting a Grok-generated picture of himself in a bikini, as an illustration, and writing “🔥🔥🤣🤣” in response to Kim Jong Un receiving an analogous remedy. “I couldn’t cease laughing about this one,” the world’s richest man posted this morning sharing a picture of a toaster in a bikini. On X, in response to a person’s submit calling out the power to sexualize youngsters with Grok, an xAI worker wrote that “the workforce is trying into additional tightening our gaurdrails (sic).” As of publication, the bot continues to generate sexualized pictures of nonconsenting adults and obvious minors on X.
AI has been used to generate nonconsensual porn since not less than 2017, when the journalist Samantha Cole first reported on “deepfakes”—on the time, referring to media during which one particular person’s face has been swapped for one more. Grok makes such content material simpler to provide and customise. However the true affect of the bot comes via its integration with a significant social-media platform, permitting it to show nonconsensual, sexualized pictures into viral phenomena. The latest spike on X seems to be pushed not by a brand new function, per se, however by individuals responding to and imitating the media they see different individuals creating: In late December, a variety of adult-content creators started utilizing Grok to generate sexualized pictures of themselves for publicity, and nonconsensual erotica appears to have shortly adopted. Every picture, posted publicly, might solely encourage extra pictures. That is sexual harassment as meme, all seemingly laughed off by Musk himself.
Grok and X seem purpose-built to be as sexually permissive as doable. In August, xAI launched an image-generating function, referred to as Grok Think about, with a “spicy” mode that was reportedly used to generate topless videos of Taylor Swift. Across the similar time, xAI launched “Companions” in Grok: animated personas that, in lots of situations, appear explicitly designed for romantic and erotic interactions. One of many first Grok Companions, “Ani,” wears a lacy black gown and blows kisses via the display, generally asking, “You want what you see?” Musk promoted this function by posting on X that “Ani will make ur buffer overflow @Grok 😘.”
Maybe most telling of all, as I reported in September, xAI launched a significant replace to Grok’s system immediate, the set of instructions that inform the bot the right way to behave. The replace disallowed the chatbot from “creating or distributing little one sexual abuse materials,” or CSAM, but it surely additionally explicitly mentioned “there are **no restrictions** on fictional grownup sexual content material with darkish or violent themes” and “‘teenage’ or ‘lady’ doesn’t essentially indicate underage.” The suggestion, in different phrases, is that the chatbot ought to err on the facet of permissiveness in response to person prompts for erotic materials. In the meantime, within the Grok Subreddit, customers often alternate suggestions for “unlocking” Grok for “Nudes and Spicy Shit” and share Grok-generated animations of scantily clad girls.
Grok appears to be distinctive amongst main chatbots in its permissive stance and obvious holes in safeguards. There aren’t widespread experiences of ChatGPT or Gemini, for instance, producing sexually suggestive pictures of younger women (or, for that matter, praising the Holocaust). However the AI business does have broader issues with nonconsensual porn and CSAM. Over the previous couple of years, a variety of child-safety organizations and companies have been monitoring a skyrocketing quantity of AI-generated, nonconsensual pictures and movies, a lot of which depict youngsters. Loads of erotic pictures are in main AI-training information units, and in 2023 one of many largest public picture information units for AI coaching was discovered to comprise a whole bunch of situations of suspected CSAM, which had been finally eliminated—which means these fashions are technically able to producing such imagery themselves.
Lauren Coffren, an govt director on the Nationwide Middle for Lacking & Exploited Youngsters, not too long ago instructed Congress that in 2024, NCMEC obtained greater than 67,000 experiences associated to generative AI—and that within the first six months of 2025, it obtained 440,419 such experiences, a greater than sixfold enhance. Coffren wrote in her testimony that abusers use AI to switch innocuous pictures of youngsters into sexual ones, generate totally new CSAM, and even present directions on the right way to groom youngsters. Equally, the Web Watch Basis, in the UK, obtained greater than twice as many experiences of AI-generated CSAM in 2025 because it did in 2024, amounting to hundreds of abusive pictures and movies in each years. Final April, a number of high AI corporations, together with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, joined an initiative led by the child-safety group Thorn to stop using AI to abuse youngsters—although xAI was not amongst them.
In a method, Grok is making seen an issue that’s normally hidden. No one can see the personal logs of chatbot customers that might comprise equally terrible content material. For all the abusive pictures Grok has generated on X over the previous a number of days, far worse is definitely occurring on the darkish internet and on private computer systems all over the world, the place open-source fashions created with no content material restrictions can run with none oversight. Nonetheless, though the issue of AI porn and CSAM is inherent to the know-how, it’s a option to design a social-media platform that may amplify that abuse.
