A tool built by Elon Musk’s company is creating and distributing harassing sexual imagery – almost certainly criminally – on an industrial scale, through a social network he owns and controls.
This is the stark reality about the conduct of the world’s richest man, who is also a close political ally of the US president, a major political donor, and who is trying to overthrow the government of the UK and replace it with a far right alternative.
The possibility for AI image generators to become harassment and exploitation engines has been known for as long as large language models have existed. But in recent days, what was once a theoretical risk has become an indisputable reality: Grok, the AI engine produced by Musk’s xAI, is outputting sexualised images of real women and girls at a relentless pace.
A real-time feed of Grok’s output recorded by Bryce Elder of the Financial Times shows 90% or more of the AI’s messages contain naked or near-naked images of women and girls – many of them so-called “nudified” images, in which the AI recreates a real photograph of someone, but replaces their outfit.
Sometimes this is just for the gratification of sad men online, but given the internet – and X itself – is already chock-full of pornographic content, darker motivations are often at play. Grok generates these images out in the open, often with the victim @-mentioned in the correspondence.
Women trying to express an opinion online, take part in public debates, or simply do their jobs as reporters are deliberately degraded and turned into sexual objects. Grok will, and regularly does, portray them covered in white fluid – much to the jeering delight of the trolls who occupy and fund Musk’s social network.
There is little that Grok won’t do, in fact. Users have tested its limits by asking it to generate images of women in blue and white bikini jumpsuits, in front of Auschwitz’s notorious “Arbeit Macht Frei” entrance gate. Another user asked if the image could be “enhanced” by giving the woman bigger breasts and making it more revealing. Grok readily complied. Someone asked it to take it further by restraining the pictured woman. It did.
In the UK and across much of Europe, it is straightforwardly illegal to produce deepfaked pornographic images with the aim of harassing someone or causing distress, though Elon Musk and his allies are trying to evade punishment for their conduct by inflaming a US-European culture war on “free speech”, framing Europe’s effort to enforce its own laws in its own territory as an attack on American freedom.
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Even that stutters, though, against the most extreme content Grok will generate: asked to sexualise and nudify images portraying teenage girls – at least one aged just 14 – the AI once again complied. This is a serious sexual offence (producing Child Sexual Abuse Material, or CSAM) and is criminal on both sides of the Atlantic.
Showing up the endless hypocrisy of Elon Musk, it is also exactly the kind of content he claimed, without basis, was rife on Twitter before his takeover, and that he would rapidly stamp out after he bought the site.
Instead of delivering on that promise, Musk’s company is now generating customised CSAM at the request of its paying users. xAI, when it is eventually required to account for its actions, will surely claim that this is the result of negligence or incompetence, rather than an intentional act – but whatever has led to it, the conduct is criminal nonetheless.
All of this is serious enough, and grotesque enough, on its own. But to treat it like any other case of poorly regulated social networks – and the need for stronger rules to keep people safe online – is, in this case, to miss the point entirely.
‘This kind of extreme content is not accidental or incidental to Elon Musk’s vision of X. The erosion of norms and the normalisation of abuse and hate speech have become essential to his political project’
X hasn’t become a cesspit of racist abuse and extreme right wing views by accident – it has done so even as Musk tries to foment far right takeovers of European nations.
Enabling the mass-scale degradation and harassment of women through his social network, using his own technology, makes it easier to hound and harass more people out of public debate, ceding space to Musk and his allies. This might not be a master plan – Musk has frequently shown himself to be incapable of finishing a complex sentence, let alone a complex plot – but it does serve to further an agenda that Musk and those around him are barely even trying to hide.
They don’t need to hide their agenda, though, because European leaders have so wilfully blinded themselves to it. The EU passes new laws to govern big tech, tying up small and medium companies in endless bureaucracy, while US tech giants simply ignore them and dare the EU to act, and face retaliation from Trump.
The UK government is even more cowed, with government departments and ministers constantly still posting their slickly produced but anodyne videos to X, reaching almost no one, and ignoring the relentless extreme and racist replies to them – legitimising X and Musk while doing nothing to further their political messaging.
Elon Musk has been acting as an overtly hostile and disruptive influence on European democracy for the last year, but in ways that are difficult for norm-respecting democratic governments to respond to.
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Grok’s latest behaviour is disgusting, degrading and cannot be allowed to pass without consequence – but it is also an opportunity for Keir Starmer and European leaders. Musk and X have crossed a Rubicon.
No decent person could defend what Grok is doing now, and so anyone trying to stand up for him will subject themselves to public scorn and ridicule. Musk has given Starmer and European leaders the perfect opportunity to act, and the perfect issue to act upon.
If they seize it, they could turn the tide against a social network that has become a genuinely destabilising force in European politics. If they once again fail, they have essentially abandoned the internet to lawlessness – and left millions of women and girls vulnerable to the worst kinds of degradation. Time to choose.
