This story was originally reported by Mariel Padilla of The 19th. Meet Mariel and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
The social media platform X has been flooded with AI-generated sexualized images of women and children in recent weeks — months before a new law aiming to ban the spread of nonconsensual intimate imagery goes into effect.
Elon Musk, the owner of X, announced a new feature with a post on Christmas Eve encouraging users to try editing images and videos with Grok, the app’s chatbot. Then, a few weeks later, as the new year began, many women noticed something disturbing online: a flood of AI-generated sexualized images of them on the social media platform X. Users on X were able to ask Grok’s latest feature to digitally remove clothing from posted photos and recirculate them.
