Comment Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. As 2025 gave way to the new year, something abominable transpired across X, formerly Twitter: A bunch of its paying subscribers spent the holidays ordering the “anti-woke” generative A.I. tool Grok to edit images of female users—from spambot accounts to K-pop celebrities to underage girls—by “removing” articles of clothing or fully “imagining” them in the nude. As this alarming trend earned worldwide attention and outrage, reaching everywhere from the United States to Brazil to Malaysia, the A.I. aggression only escalated, with outputs even promoting violence against women. By late December, one user had prompted Grok to “write a heartfelt apology note” over the matter; the bot followed instructions, and various media outlets credulously wrote that Grok itself “apologized” for the illegal and sexualized images, despite the fact that it is a large language model that is not itself sentient or in total control. X owner Elon Musk and other executives at xAI—the artificial intelligence company that now owns X Corporation—appeared to make light of the matter before acknowledging that they needed to “tighten our gaurdrails.” “What we’re seeing with Grok is a clear example of how powerful AI image-editing tools can be misused when safety and consent aren’t built in from the start,” Cliff Steinhauer, director of information security and engagement at the National Cybersecurity Alliance, wrote in a statement to Slate. We’re now into the first full week of January, and not only are Grok users still able to manipulate the bot into generating inappropriate images of minors, but many of the offending deepfakes are reportedly still live, even though some Grok enthusiasts have had their accounts suspended. Musk and his supplicants continue to celebrate “record engagement” and blithely promote the generative A.I. bot and its newest update, Grok Imagine, with little to no acknowledgement of the persistent masses of deepfaked pornography and child sexual abuse images. Musk has even encouraged his fans to add Grok to “your friends and family’s phones.” (Whether these friends and family are of appropriate ages or have the stomachs for such deluges of repellent visuals was left unclear.) Independent sites like Copyleaks are now digging into the prompts responsible for the output. Ashley St. Clair, the conservative influencer who claims to have mothered one of Musk’s many children, was also caught up in the deepfake spree and is reportedly considering taking legal action on behalf of herself and other affected users. Advertisement