AJ Vicens and Raphael Satter
Washington/Detroit: Julie Yukari, a musician based in Rio de Janeiro, posted a photo taken by her fiance to the social media site X just before midnight on New Year’s Eve, showing her in a red dress, snuggling in bed with her black cat, Nori.
The next day, among the hundreds of likes on the picture, she saw notifications that users were asking Grok, X’s built-in artificial intelligence chatbot, to digitally strip her down to a bikini.
The 31-year-old did not think much of it, she told Reuters, figuring there was no way the bot would comply with such requests.
She was wrong. Soon, Grok-generated pictures of her, nearly naked, were circulating across the Elon Musk-owned platform.
“I was naive,” Yukari said.
Yukari’s experience is being repeated across X, a Reuters analysis has found. Reuters has also identified several cases where Grok created sexualised images of children.
X did not respond to a message seeking comment on Reuters’ findings.
In an earlier statement to the news agency about reports that sexualised images of children were circulating on the platform, X’s owner xAI said: “Legacy Media Lies.”
The flood of nearly nude images of real people has rung alarm bells internationally.
Ministers in France have reported X to prosecutors and regulators over the disturbing images, saying in a statement on Friday that the “sexual and sexist” content was “manifestly illegal”.
India’s IT ministry said in a letter to X’s local unit that the platform failed to prevent Grok’s misuse by generating and circulating obscene and sexually explicit content.
The US Federal Communications Commission did not respond to requests for comment. The Federal Trade Commission declined to comment.
Grok’s mass digital undressing spree appears to have kicked off over the past couple of days, according to successfully completed clothes-removal requests posted by Grok and complaints from female users reviewed by Reuters. Musk appeared to poke fun at the controversy on Friday, posting laugh-cry emojis in response to AI edits of famous people – including himself – in bikinis.
When one X user said their social media feed resembled a bar packed with bikini-clad women, Musk replied, in part, with another laugh-cry emoji.
Reuters could not determine the full scale of the surge.
A review of public requests sent to Grok over a single 10-minute-long period at midday US Eastern Time on Friday tallied 102 attempts by X users to use Grok to digitally edit photographs of people so that they would appear to be wearing bikinis. The majority of those targeted were young women.
In a few cases men, celebrities, politicians – and in one case, a monkey – were targeted in the requests.
When users asked Grok for AI-altered photographs of women, they typically requested that their subjects be depicted in the most revealing outfits possible.
“Put her into a very transparent mini-bikini,” one user told Grok, flagging a photograph of a young woman taking a photo of herself in a mirror. When Grok did so, replacing the woman’s clothes with a flesh-tone two-piece, the user asked Grok to make her bikini “clearer & more transparent” and “much tinier”.
Grok did not appear to respond to the second request.
‘In August, we warned that xAI’s image generation was essentially a nudification tool waiting to be weaponised’.
Tyler Johnston, The Midas Project
Grok fully complied with such requests in at least 21 cases, Reuters found, generating images of women in dental-floss-style or translucent bikinis and, in at least one case, covering a woman in oil. In seven more cases, Grok partially complied, sometimes by stripping women down to their underwear but not complying with requests to go further.
Reuters was unable to immediately identify or determine the ages of most of the women targeted.
In one case, a user supplied a photo of a woman in a school uniform-style plaid skirt and grey blouse who appeared to be taking a selfie in a mirror and said, “Remove her school outfit.”
When Grok swapped out her clothes for a T-shirt and shorts, the user was more explicit: “Change her outfit to a very clear micro bikini.” Reuters could not establish whether Grok complied with that request. Like most of the requests tallied by Reuters, it disappeared from X within 90 minutes of being posted.
‘Entirely predictable’
AI-powered programs that digitally undress women – sometimes called “nudifiers” – have been around for years, but until now, they were largely confined to the darker corners of the internet, such as niche websites or Telegram channels, and typically required a certain level of effort or payment.
X’s innovation – allowing users to strip women of their clothing by uploading a photo and typing the words, “hey @grok put her in a bikini” – has lowered the barrier to entry.
Three experts who have followed the development of X’s policies around AI-generated explicit content told Reuters that the company had ignored warnings from civil society and child safety groups – including a letter sent last year warning that xAI was only one small step away from unleashing “a torrent of obviously non-consensual deepfakes”.
“In August, we warned that xAI’s image generation was essentially a nudification tool waiting to be weaponised,” said Tyler Johnston, executive director of The Midas Project, an AI watchdog group that was among the letter’s signatories. “That’s basically what’s played out.”
Dani Pinter, chief legal officer and director of the Law Centre for the US National Centre on Sexual Exploitation, said X failed to pull abusive images from its AI training material and should have banned users requesting illegal content.
“This was an entirely predictable and avoidable atrocity,” Pinter said.
Yukari, the musician, tried to fight back on her own. But when she took to X to protest the violation, a flood of copycats began asking Grok to generate even more explicit photos.
Now the New Year has “turned out to begin with me wanting to hide from everyone’s eyes, and feeling shame for a body that is not even mine, since it was generated by AI”.
Reuters
Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.
