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One Australian victim, who goes by Ele online, says she was targeted after she posted on the platform that she did not consent.<\/p>\n
The ABC has decided not to identify Ele or to share the images created of her, to protect her privacy.<\/p>\n
“As soon as I explicitly said that I did not consent and I was not with it, it somehow enraged a bunch of men, who \u2026 decided to generate said images,” Ele told triple j hack.<\/p>\n
“There was one \u2026 who generated an image of me in a burqa.<\/p>\n
“There was another who \u2026 turned my shirt into a bikini, then to a micro bikini, then to dental floss, and then \u2014 to get around Grok’s safety features \u2014 asked it to cover me in doughnut glaze, which it did.”![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/5a1d4bd4580b4e76056e54f72049eb8b.jpeg\")
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A grok prompt used against Australian erotic model Ele. (Source: X)<\/p>\n
Ele is a content creator who posts non-nude sexual content on X and on paid subscription sites.<\/p>\n
When she spoke out about the AI-generated fake images on X, some other users told her she should not complain because of the type of photos she had already posted on the site.<\/p>\n
“I think it’s the exact same as telling a woman she shouldn’t drink if she doesn’t want to be sexually assaulted,” Ele told hack.<\/p>\n
“Like, yes, this is a risk that is involved with doing a certain type of work, but it shouldn’t happen.<\/p>\n
“And I think the men saying that are definitely trying to cover and hide from accountability.”<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/1d6800649ec30d44b42132dc3cb8fbae.jpeg\")
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Ele posted on X after Grok created fake images of her without her consent. (Supplied.)<\/p>\n
Ele is not alone in being targeted by users on X.<\/p>\n
American analytics firm Copyleaks estimated Grok generated roughly one non-consensual sexual image every minute in the 48 hours to December 31.<\/p>\n
A separate analysis of Grok requests and posts by European non-profit AI Forensics suggested more than half the images created by Grok contained people in “minimal attire”, and that 81 per cent of the images were of women.<\/p>\n
The group says it analysed 20,000 Grok-generated images and 50,000 user requests, and found that 2 per cent of the posts appeared to depict people under the age of 18.<\/p>\n
In Australia, the ABC has seen Grok-generated undressed images of at least four Australian politicians.<\/p>\n
AI abuse ‘no surprise’<\/p>\n
Dr Joel Scalan, who is a senior lecturer at the Child Sexual Abuse Material Deterrence Centre at the University of Tasmania, says AI companies appear to be bypassing safeguards in the pursuit of profits.<\/p>\n
![\"Dr](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/b801fbc7899553add2ffc216555332d9.jpeg\")
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Dr Joel Scanlan says AI companies are abandoning safeguards to try and attract more users. (ABC News: Scott Ross)<\/p>\n
He said the issues being raised by X users about Grok were not surprising.<\/p>\n
“We have a culture in tech companies of ‘move fast and break things,'” Dr Scanlan told triple j hack.<\/p>\n
“That’s the label they came up with 20 years ago, and it’s still very much the case.<\/p>\n
“In the context of AI \u2026 anything that they can get into the press to get their platform out there is seen as a bit of a positive.<\/p>\n
“It’s profit over protection \u2026 [Elon Musk] sees it as being, ‘hey, it’s free speech, let’s just use the tools in any way that we can’, however, that doesn’t mean there’s no societal impact.”Musk continues to promote AI tool<\/p>\n
X owner Elon Musk addressed concerns about illegal content on the platform in a post earlier this week.<\/p>\n
In the post, he wrote that anyone who used Grok to create illegal content would be punished.<\/p>\n
But since Musk’s post, the bot has continued to respond to prompts requesting it to undress women, and in some cases, children.<\/p>\n
The ABC contacted xAI about Grok to ask whether more safeguards would be put in place to protect users, and received what appeared to be an auto-reply: “Legacy Media Lies.”<\/p>\n
On Friday, the AI bot began denying user requests for altered images.<\/p>\n
It posted that the image generator had been limited to paying subscribers due to concerns about non-consensual sexual imagery.<\/p>\n
Governments from France and India to the UK have condemned the use of Grok to “undress” women without their consent, with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer calling it a “disgrace” and the country’s independent communications regulator saying it had made contact with X and xAI about the issue.<\/p>\n
In Australia, a spokesperson for the eSafety Commissioner said eSafety had “received reporting relating to the use of Grok to generate sexualised images of adults and children”.<\/p>\n
The spokesperson said while some reports were still being assessed, reports of child exploitation material did not “meet the classification for threshold for class 1 material” and so no takedown notices had been issued.<\/p>\n
“eSafety remains concerned about the increasing use of generative AI to sexualise or exploit people, particularly where children are involved,” the spokesperson said.<\/p>\n
Can generative AI ever be safe?<\/p>\n
For Australian X users like Ele, the non-consensual images are a sign that X needs to do more to protect its users.<\/p>\n
Ele says she would like X to give account holders the option to opt out of having their images manipulated by AI.<\/p>\n
“There should be a very strict feature to allow people to opt out \u2026 I do not believe if a person is detected by the AI, that the AI should be able to do anything with that,” she told hack.<\/p>\n
“The platforms should make sure it is not possible unless the person turns on that feature.”<\/p>\n
At the University of Tasmania, Dr Scanlan said that while it would be technically challenging for companies to offer an opt-out solution, there were other mitigating steps they could take.<\/p>\n
“Large language models are great at understanding the intent of people and what they’re asking.<\/p>\n
“Having a large language model saying ‘Is this a sexualise-based request?’ is actually not super complicated or hard. They’re actually sort of just choosing not to actually put those strong safeguards in place.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Australian users of Elon Musk’s X platform are speaking out about non-consensual sexual images of themselves being generated…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":402734,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":["post-402733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=402733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402733\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/402734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=402733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=402733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=402733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}