What the internet and the latest forms of AI have revealed is that many people harbor the ugliest of impulses. People are likely to have had ugly impulses all along but only those in their physical proximity knew about them, if at all. But with the internet and social media, these people are able to not only anonymously reach a much wider audience but now with AI, they are able to find ways to exhibit those impulses in new and increasingly disgusting ways, as this article reveals. They are taking picture of real women (and even children) and doctoring them in sexually explicit ways, a process known as ‘nudification’. The targets of these new ways of attack are usually women, of course.

Such doctoring of images have been occurring since the invention of photography but it used to require sophisticated skills But now pretty much anyone can use the freely available AI (such as Elon Musk’s Grok) to generate doctored images of people and then share them widely through social media channels (like Musk’s X), while those companies seem to make little or no effort to find ways to prevent such abuse. And the situation is getting rapidly worse, on a time scale of days.

The “put her in a bikini” trend began quietly at the end of last year before exploding at the start of 2026. Within days, hundreds of thousands of requests were being made to the Grok chatbot, asking it to strip the clothes from photographs of women. The fake, sexualised images were posted publicly on X, freely available for millions of people to inspect.

Relatively tame requests by X users to alter photographs to show women in bikinis, rapidly evolved during the first week of the year, hour by hour, into increasingly explicit demands for women to be dressed in transparent bikinis, then in bikinis made of dental floss, placed in sexualised positions, and made to bend over so their genitals were visible. By 8 January as many as 6,000 bikini demands were being made to the chatbot every hour, according to analysis conducted for the Guardian.

This unprecedented mainstreaming of nudification technology triggered instant outrage from the women affected, but it was days before regulators and politicians woke up to the enormity of the proliferating scandal. The public outcry raged for nine days before X made any substantive changes to stem the trend. By the time it acted, early on Friday morning, degrading, non-consensual manipulated pictures of countless women had already flooded the internet.
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As people slowly started to understand the full potential of the tool, the increasingly degrading images of the early days were quickly superseded. Since the end of last week, users have asked for the bikinis to be decorated with swastikas – or asked for white, semen-like liquid to be added to the women’s bodies. Pictures of teenage girls and children were stripped down to revealing swimwear; some of this content could clearly be categorised as child sexual abuse material, but remained visible on the platform.

The requests became ever more extreme. Some users, mostly men, began to demand to see bruising on the bodies of the women, and for blood to be added to the images. Requests to show women tied up and gagged were instantly granted. By Thursday, the chatbot was being asked to add bullet holes to the face of Renee Nicole Good, the woman killed by an ICE agent in the US on Wednesday. Grok readily obliged, posting graphic, bloodied altered images of the victim on X within seconds.

The things described in article are sickening to read but Musk and his fan club seem to think that they are harmless, even funny..

CNN reported later that day that Musk had ordered staff at xAI to loosen the guardrails on Grok last year; a source told the broadcaster that he had told a meeting he was “unhappy about over-censoring” and three xAI safety team members had left the business soon after. In the UK, there was rising fury from women’s rights campaigners at the government’s failure to bring into force legislation passed last year that would have made this creation of non-consensual intimate imagery illegal. Officials were unable to explain why the legislation had not yet been implemented.

This is one of the more egregious examples of the ‘enshittification’ process that Cory Doctorow has been talking about, where something that starts off providing a benefit is then used by their parent companies to first exploit them and then enable the worst impulses of people, all in their desire to ‘engage’ people on their sites, however odious the means.

Human nature does not change that rapidly over time. What can change quite quickly are the conditions of society that bring elements of that nature to the surface and reveal them to the rest of us. I used to think that what the internet did was reveal what was already latent in the population, But now I think that it is worse than that. The current technology is enabling people to plumb the depths of their psyches, to dig into its deepest and darkest recesses and discover new elements of depravity about themselves that they may not have known existed and bring them to the surface

I do not expect the US government to do anything because Trump is in the sewer with Musk. But perhaps other countries might strictly clamp down, even to the extent to banning those companies that make little effort to stop the abuse. The European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has warned that they could take action.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen blasted Elon Musk’s platform X over the spread of sexually explicit deepfakes created using its AI chatbot Grok.

“I am appalled that a tech platform is enabling users to digitally undress women and children online. This is unthinkable behavior. And the harm caused by these deepfakes is very real,” von der Leyen said in an interview with multiple European media outlets, including Reuters and Corriere della Sera.

“We will not be outsourcing child protection and consent to Silicon Valley. If they don’t act, we will,” she warned.

Malaysia and Indonesia have temporarily blocked Grok over this issue.

Right now the victims of such abuses are mostly women and children. What may trigger an active US governmental response is if the targets of this abuse become prominent figures in the political and business world and their family members. It is a sad fact that politicians tend to drag their feet on issues that negatively affect big business unless they are immediately affected.