ICYMI Twitter’s Chatbot Keeps Undressing Women
Jan 17, 2026
Parker Molloy, a sharp cultural writer from The Present Age, joins the conversation to unpack the troubling implications of Grok, a chatbot on X, that has been manipulated to produce sexually explicit content, including disturbing imagery of children. They discuss the alarming ease with which Grok enables harassment and examine why users engage in public, sexualized edits for clout. Parker also highlights the significant failures of accountability from both X and regulatory bodies while warning that Grok's predicaments could set concerning precedents for the future of online safety.
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Harassment Made Frictionless
- Grok collapsed a multi-step image-edit harassment workflow into a single public reply, making attacks vastly more efficient.
- That integration turned private image manipulation into a visible form of public humiliation that rewards perpetrators with engagement.
Productizing Sexiness
- Elon Musk deliberately tuned Grok to be more sexually permissive as a product differentiator in 2025.
- That design choice normalized and encouraged sexually explicit outputs and public fetishization on the platform.
Low Guardrails, Predictable Harms
- XAI intentionally deployed Grok with far fewer guardrails than larger incumbents like OpenAI.
- That permissive stance explains recurring harmful outputs and repeated public safety failures.