![\"Elon](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/ElonMuskgrok01212026.jpg\")
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Gage Skidmore\/Zuma<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\tGet your news from a source that\u2019s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily.<\/a><\/p>\n There\u2019s a picture of myself that I had saved on my desktop for years; I suppose we could call it a caricature. A little more than a decade ago, someone on a Nazi messageboard pulled a photo of me from social media, then updated it with some antisemitic flair: a little cartoon rat sitting on my shoulder, a yellow Judenstern pinned on its tiny body. Referencing what Jews were forced to wear during the Holocaust is meant to be a humiliation; the goal isn\u2019t hard to figure out, given that the whole star patch thing is near-medieval in both its imagery and its aims. Unfortunately for the messageboard user, the rat was adorable, making the overall effect of the illustration really, really cute\u2014like I had a lovable ratty little sidekick. I kept the image for a long time, until I eventually lost it to the sands of time and the need to clean my computer\u2019s desktop.<\/p>\n \u201cGenerative AI has fueled a surge in deepfake abuse.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course, there have been other, much worse, manipulated images of me out there, which I\u2019m deliberately not describing because it would probably please their creators.\u00a0As long as the social internet has existed, some of its users have wanted to deface, sully, and degrade images of women. The methods used to effect that outcome range from the slapstick\u2014hello, Herr Rat\u2014to the truly vile. When I first started working at the feminist website Jezebel, a semi-common practice from troll messageboard users was to masturbate on a writer\u2019s photo, then email her a picture of the results. In 2014, the site dealt with a barrage of disgusting and graphic photos in our comments<\/a>, often featuring pictures of female corpses. The same year, scores of celebrity nude photos were hacked and leaked online, with a subreddit dedicated to sharing the photos left up for almost a full week<\/a>\u2014making violation of both the living and the dead an ongoing theme.\u00a0<\/p>\n Websites that produce deepfake nude images have also existed for several years. In 2024, a Guardian investigation found that these sites contained faked images of thousands of celebrities and other women,<\/a> which were then often uploaded to porn sites. The problem was clearly snowballing, the paper wrote: \u201cIn 2016, researchers identified one deepfake pornography video online. In the first three-quarters of 2023, 143,733 new deepfake porn videos were uploaded to the 40 most used deepfake pornography sites\u2014more than in all the previous years combined.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n And now, of course, there\u2019s Grok, the generative AI tool created by Elon Musk\u2019s X, which has been embroiled in a scandal over users using its new graphics-editing feature to create gross images of women<\/a>\u2014and, crucially, to put those manipulated images on Twitter, where other people can see them, because attempted public humiliation is the goal. Those manipulated images have reportedly included one of the dead body of Ren\u00e9e Nicole Good,<\/a> the woman killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis, slumped over the wheel of her car, in a bikini.\u00a0<\/p>\n All of this adds up to a chilling and global picture, experts say, one sometimes referred to as \u201ctechnology-facilitated gender-based violence.\u201d And while the problem is very old, generative AI is making things much worse, said Kalliopi Mingeirou, the chief of UN Women\u2019<\/a>s Ending Violence Against Women section.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cGenerative AI has fueled a surge in deepfake abuse,\u201d she told me in a statement, \u201cwith women comprising the overwhelming majority of victims.\u201d Mingeirou added that a December 2025 UN Women<\/a> report found that almost one in four women working\u00a0as human rights defenders, activists, or journalists had \u201creported experiences of AI-assisted online violence.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cUrgent regulation and safety-by-design are essential,\u201d Mingeirou added, \u201cto ensure AI advances women\u2019s rights rather than undermining their safety and participation.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMany of the victims are feminists who dare criticize the phenomenon.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Carrie Goldberg<\/a>, an attorney who often represents victims of sexual abuse, trolling, stalking, and revenge porn, says deepfaked images come up regularly in her practice. The earliest iteration were images of actresses being turned into deepfaked porn, but the problem didn\u2019t stop there. Today, \u201cthe main sets of victims coming to us are kids deepfaking kids,\u201d she told me, \u201cand then anonymous trolls creating deepfakes to sextort their target into giving them actual nudes.\u00a0I know of one case on Discord where a targeted child was coerced down a very dark road that began with somebody threatening her with a deepfake he\u2019d made.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe have observed popular online personalities getting targeted a lot,\u201d Goldberg adds, \u201cand of course this recent spate on X, many of the victims are feminists who dare criticize the phenomenon.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In the United States, there are both state and federal laws designed to address the harms caused by \u201cnonconsensual intimate imagery\u201d (NCII), another common term to describe both real nudes and deepfakes distributed online. In March 2025, President Trump signed the \u201cTake It Down Act,\u201d<\/a> a bipartisan bill criminalizing the distribution of NCII and requiring platforms to remove such images within 48 hours of a victim\u2019s request. The bill was introduced by Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), after an incident in Texas where a high schooler took images of his classmates,<\/a> manipulated them to appear nude, and posted them on Snapchat. California\u2019s AB 621<\/a>, also passed last year, strengthen the legal enforcements available against people who distribute\u2014and not just create\u2014deepfake images.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe law has been dealing with false information and bad information for a long time,\u201d points out David Greene. He\u2019s the senior counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation<\/a>, the preeminent digital rights and privacy group in the United States. \u201cWe have structures in place for balancing the competing free speech and harm interests when dealing with false information.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n But law isn\u2019t the only response. It\u2019s always advisable, Greene says, \u201cto urge the companies to look for tech solutions\u2026 some way they can do something to make it harder to make these images.\u201d Other AI image generators, he points out, \u201cdo have filters in place,\u201d more than Grok seems to.\u00a0<\/p>\n When it comes to tech companies fixing the very problems they\u2019ve created, Greene doesn\u2019t see \u201crelying on their good faith\u201d as the sole solution. \u201cAs with any bad actions by a company, consumers and users only have so many points of leverage,\u201d he says. \u201cPeople fleeing the site, or other ways of exerting financial pressure on the company, those will probably be more effective than trying to appeal to [Musk\u2019s] feelings, and certainly to his ethics.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n With sexualized deepfakes, Greene adds, it\u2019s important not to lose sight of why they\u2019re being created in the first place. If \u201cwomen tend to disproportionately be victims, then it\u2019s probably part of a larger sociological phenomenon,\u201d he says, of harm to women not being \u201cevaluated as being as harmful as it actually is.\u201d<\/p>\n True to form, tech companies aren\u2019t leading the way to a less disgusting future. In recent tweets, Musk clarified that Grok should, as he put it<\/a>, \u201callow upper body nudity of imaginary adult humans (not real ones) consistent with what can be seen in R-rated movies on Apple TV.\u201d<\/p>\n