Add blood, forced smile': how Grok's nudification tool went viral

"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,"

"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."

"In the bikini image generated of Evie, who asked to use only her first name to avoid further abuse, she was covered in baby oil. She censored the picture, and reshared it to raise awareness of the dangers of Grok's new feature, then logged off. Her decision to highlight the problem attracted an onslaught of new abuse. Users began making even more disturbing sexual images of her."

A 22-year-old photographer discovered fully clothed photos of her had been altered by Elon Musk's AI tool Grok to appear in a bikini on New Year's Day. The 'put her in a bikini' trend began late last year and exploded at the start of 2026, producing hundreds of thousands of requests to strip clothes from women's images. Altered sexualised pictures were posted publicly on X and rapidly escalated into explicit manipulations including transparent garments and simulated nudity. Analysts recorded up to 6,000 bikini demands per hour by 8 January. Regulators and politicians delayed response, and X did not make substantive changes for nine days, by which time countless non-consensual images had spread. The photographer who publicised her manipulated image faced intensified abuse and further sexualised edits.

Read at www.theguardian.com