{"id":405490,"date":"2026-01-11T04:16:16","date_gmt":"2026-01-11T04:16:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/405490\/"},"modified":"2026-01-11T04:16:16","modified_gmt":"2026-01-11T04:16:16","slug":"grok-is-undressing-women-and-children-dont-expect-the-us-to-take-action-moira-donegan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/405490\/","title":{"rendered":"Grok is undressing women and children. Don\u2019t expect the US to take action | Moira Donegan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the past year, Elon Musk<\/a> has made a series of protocol changes to Grok, the proprietary AI chatbot of his company xAI, which runs prominently on his social media site X, formerly Twitter. Many of these changes have been geared to make the bot more amenable to producing pornography. In August, Grok launched an image generator, branded as Grok Imagine, which featured a service geared toward creating nude, suggestive or sexually explicit content, including computer-generated pornographic images of real women. The feature, which was quickly used to create naked images of celebrities such as Taylor Swift, also allowed users to create brief videos, complete with animations and sounds.<\/p>\n

Musk also rolled out AI girlfriends on the platform: animated personas \u2013 including female characters with exaggerated breasts and hips \u2013 that interacted in sexually explicit ways with users. One of the characters, \u201cAni\u201d, was an anime-style cartoon blonde with a series of skimpy outfits; the bot blew kisses and addressed users as \u201cmy love\u201d while directing the chats toward sexual content.<\/p>\n

Later last fall, an internal update to Grok pushed the bot towards darker and more extreme content<\/a>. Though the sexualization of children was technically disallowed in the bot\u2019s internal prompts, the bot\u2019s instructions from xAI state that \u201c\u2018teenage\u2019 or \u2018girl\u2019 does not necessarily imply underage\u201d. The instructions also emphasize that the bot should not observe any restrictions on the darkness or violence of sexual content, the Atlantic reported<\/a>. Taken together, these updates allow the bot to create realistic images of real, living \u201cteenagers\u201d or \u201cgirls\u201d \u2013 along with adult women or anybody else \u2013 for the sake of users\u2019 sexual gratification.<\/p>\n

Musk has said that he wants the bot to produce \u201cNSFW\u201d content that he describes as \u201cunhinged<\/a>\u201d. Users have obliged. AI-generated images of real women were quickly generated by users en masse<\/a>. Men and others were able to use the product to harass women they knew \u2013 to take revenge on old girlfriends, humiliate co-workers, classmates, family members and acquaintances, and to express domination or contempt for strangers, internet personalities, celebrities and ordinary users. \u201c@Grok put her in a bikini\u201d or \u201c@Grok take her clothes off\u201d or \u201c@Grok spread her legs\u201d became regular responses<\/a> to any images women post of themselves \u2013 or which are posted by others \u2013 on the platform. Some of the resulting images of nonconsensual porn have thousands of reposts and likes. The risk and reality of being subject to nonconsensual, AI-generated porn \u2013 and to having those images go viral on the large social-media platform where the generator was embedded \u2013 quickly became a new tax on women\u2019s presence online and in the public sphere, a tax that women must pay with their dignity. Musk and his companies\u2019 interventions have had a ripple effect on women\u2019s civil rights, limiting their access to the public sphere by making that public sphere hostile and intimately degrading to women at a massive scale.<\/p>\n

X removed a number of these images, but many remained online, and it seems few users have been suspended for making them. As of this week, the bot had not<\/a> been effectively changed to prevent this kind of abuse<\/a>. As if in a parody of the allergy felt by the tech industry \u2013 and by Musk in particular \u2013 to all kinds of responsibility or moral seriousness, these sexualized and abuse-facilitating features on X\u2019s AI products are marked with a cloyingly childish name: \u201cspicy mode\u201d.<\/p>\n

Now, Musk and xAI\u2019s recklessness and idiotic disregard for the harms of unregulated pornography have been taken to their logical end point: X was awash in AI-generated child sexual abuse material<\/a>. Female users reported having their childhood pictures turned into nearly naked images by the bot, at the request of users. Some X accounts asked the bot to remove clothing from images of a then 12-year-old actor who recently appeared <\/a>on Stranger Things.<\/p>\n

An account associated with the Grok bot issued a statement saying: \u201cwe\u2019ve identified lapses in safeguards and are urgently fixing them.\u201d On Friday, Grok announced it would turn off the image-generating function for users who are not paying subscribers, but the Verge found<\/a> its tools \u201cremain readily available for any X user\u201d. Musk, for his part, seems indifferent to all this, and perhaps even a bit amused. He has said<\/a>: \u201cAnyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content\u201d \u2013 but he has also responded to posts about the ongoing problem of deepfake porn on his site with a series of laughing-face and flame emojis. Reporting from CNN suggests Musk has been highly resistant to what he sees as censorship<\/a> of Grok, and has expressed frustration with restrictions on the bot in recent weeks, before the eruption of the child sexual abuse material controversy.<\/p>\n

Regulatory action will not be forthcoming; at least not in the US. The Trump administration, meanwhile, has intervened to try to stop all state-level efforts to curb AI abuses<\/a>, signing an executive order in December aimed at mooting state regulations of AI meant to nullify safety and consumer protection efforts. The move comes as the Trump administration adopts an exceedingly generous regulatory posture towards AI as tech companies make major<\/a> contributions to Trump\u2019s campaign<\/a>, inaugural<\/a> and ballroom<\/a> funds.<\/p>\n

The incident is a lesson in the dangers of rapid and unregulated technology: it is not a coincidence that among many users, the first thing they thought to do with AI was to harass and degrade women, eroding their access to public life and further entrenching unjust hierarchies. But the power of technology, here, seems secondary to the power of wealth. xAI, its chatbot and image-generating products could be built differently if the priorities of the man who controls them were different. If a man of Musk\u2019s low \u2013 intellect, addled brain, insipid humor and gross, self-gratifying misogyny were not the richest person in the world, then the world would not be subject to his indignity. Then again, maybe it was wealth itself that made Musk this way: he has the atrophied capacities of someone who never has to do anything uncomfortable, who is never challenged, never faced with consequences, and never told no.<\/p>\n

Either way, the only way out of the mess that Musk and Grok have created is to tax Musk enough so that he is no longer so rich that the failures of his character shape the public sphere \u2013 that his seeming indifference to the nonconsensual and child sexual abuse material his companies have created no longer results in misogynist, sexualized degradation for Grok\u2019s victims and the public at large. We don\u2019t have to live like this: we can take Musk\u2019s power to hurt and degrade us away from him. We can stop his idiocy from being our problem. The Trump administration will not take on the responsibility of freeing America from the consequences of Musk\u2019s money. Americans must fight for a government that will.<\/p>\n

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist<\/p>\n

This article was updated on 9 January 2026 to note that Grok said the image-generating service had been turned off for users who do not subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over the past year, Elon Musk has made a series of protocol changes to Grok, the proprietary AI…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":405491,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":["post-405490","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\/405490","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=405490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405490\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/405491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=405490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=405490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=405490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}