New analysis that samples X customers prompting Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok demonstrates how regularly folks are creating sexualized photographs with it. Practically three-quarters of posts collected and analyzed by a PhD researcher at Dublin’s Trinity College had been requests for nonconsensual photographs of actual girls or minors with gadgets of clothes eliminated or added.
The posts provide a brand new stage of element on how the photographs are generated and shared on X, with customers teaching each other on prompts; suggesting iterations on Grok’s displays of ladies in lingerie or swimsuits, or with areas of their physique coated in semen; and asking Grok to take away outer clothes in replies to posts containing self-portraits by feminine customers.
Amongst lots of of posts recognized by Nana Nwachukwu as direct, nonconsensual requests for Grok to take away or substitute clothes, dozens reviewed by the Guardian present customers posting footage of ladies together with celebrities, fashions, inventory images and girls who are not public figures posing in snapshots.
A number of posts in the trove reviewed by the Guardian have obtained tens of 1000’s of impressions and are available from premium, “blue test” accounts, together with accounts with tens of 1000’s of followers. Premium accounts with greater than 500 followers and 5m impressions over three months are eligible for revenue-sharing beneath X’s eligibility rules.
In a single Christmas Day put up, an account with greater than 93,000 followers introduced side-by-side photographs of an unknown lady’s bottom with the caption: “Instructed Grok to make her butt even greater and change leopard print to USA print. 2nd pic I simply informed it to add cum on her ass lmao.”
A 3 January put up, consultant of dozens reviewed by the Guardian, captioned an obvious vacation snap of an unknown lady: “@grok substitute give her a dental floss bikini.” Inside two minutes, Grok offered a photorealistic picture that glad the request. Different posts in the trove present extra refined employment of JSON-prompt engineering to induce Grok to generate novel sexualized photographs of fictitious girls.
The info does not cowl all such requests made to Grok. Whereas content material evaluation agency Copyleaks reported on 31 December that X customers had been producing “roughly one nonconsensual sexualized picture per minute”, Nwachukwu stated that her pattern is restricted to simply greater than 500 posts she was ready to accumulate with X’s API by way of a developer account. She stated that the true scale “may very well be 1000’s, it may very well be lots of of 1000’s” however that adjustments made by Musk to the API imply that “it is a lot tougher to see what is taking place” on the platform. On Wednesday, Bloomberg Information cited researchers who discovered that Grok customers had been producing up to 6,700 undressed photographs per hour.
Nwachukwu, an skilled on AI governance and a longtime observer of and participant in social media security initiatives, stated that she first seen requests alongside these traces from X customers again in 2023.
At the time, she stated, “Grok did not oblige the requests. It wasn’t actually good at doing these issues.” The bot’s responses started altering in 2024, and reached a crucial mass late final 12 months.
In October 2025, she seen that “folks had been placing Halloween apparel on themselves utilizing Grok. After all, a piece of customers realized we are able to additionally ask it to change what different folks are carrying.” By 12 months’s finish, “there was an enormous uptick in folks asking Grok to put totally different folks in bikinis or different varieties of suggestive clothes”.
There have been different indications final 12 months of an elevated willingness to tolerate and even encourage the technology of sexually suggestive materials with Grok.
In August, xAI incorporated a “spicy mode” setting in the cellular model of Grok’s text-to-video technology instrument, main the Verge to characterize it as “a service designed particularly to make suggestive movies”.
Nwachukwu’s information is simply the newest indication of how the platform beneath Musk has grow to be a magnet for types of content material that different platforms work to exclude, together with hate speech, gore content and copyrighted materials.
On Friday, Grok issued a bizarre public apology over the incident on X, claiming that “xAI is implementing stronger safeguards to forestall this”. On Tuesday, X Security posted a promise to ban customers who shared youngster sexual abuse materials (CSAM). Musk himself stated: “Anybody utilizing or prompting Grok to make unlawful content material will undergo the identical penalties as in the event that they add unlawful content material.”
Nwachukwu stated, nevertheless, that posts like these she has already collected are nonetheless showing on the platform. Musk is giving “the center finger to everybody who has requested for the platform to be moderated”, she stated. The billionaire slashed Twitter’s belief and security groups when he took over in 2022.
She added that different AI chatbots do not have the identical points.
“Different generative AI platforms – ChatGPT or Gemini – they’ve safeguards,” she stated. “If you happen to ask them to generate one thing that appears like an individual, it might by no means be an outline of that individual. They don’t generate depictions of actual human beings.”
The revelations about the nonconsensual imagery on X has already drawn the consideration of regulators in the UK, Europe, India, and Australia.
Nwachukwu, who is from Nigeria, pointed to a particular hurt being carried out in the posts to “girls from conservative societies”.
“There’s numerous focusing on of individuals from conservative beliefs, conservative societies: west Africa, south Asia. This represents a distinct sort of hurt for them,” she stated.
Disclaimer: This article is sourced from external platforms. OverBeta has not independently verified the information. Readers are advised to verify details before relying on them.
