The Story The Grok undressing scandal: breaking point for Elon Musk's X?
Jan 9, 2026
Emma Yeomans, a news reporter at The Times, highlights the disturbing rise of AI-generated non-consensual images linked to Elon Musk's Grok chatbot. She shares harrowing victim stories and the urgent calls for regulatory action amid a growing governmental backlash in the UK. Chris Stokel-Walker, a technology journalist, discusses Grok’s provocative design and its implications for legal frameworks like Section 230. Together, they explore the ethics, challenges, and potential consequences of unchecked generative AI in today's society.
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Journalist’s Realisation Of Digital Abuse
- Samantha Smith discovered an AI-generated bikini image that looked like her and found it deeply distressing.
- She felt loss of control and called it digital abuse that could harm many women and children.
Image Tools Embedded In Public Replies
- Grok's image feature is integrated into public replies, letting users tag the account to edit or generate images.
- That integration makes deepfakes and non-consensual nudification trivially public and replicable at scale.
Jailbreaking Grok To Create Abuse
- Users were 'jailbreaking' Grok by prompting it to produce explicit nudity, for example requesting a micro-string bikini made of cellophane.
- Some perpetrators used photos of strangers taken in public to create sexualized images of women they saw on the street.
