The Grok undressing scandal: breaking point for Elon Musk's X?
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 9 January 2026
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In December, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot ‘Grok’ rolled out a new image-editing feature on his social media site, X. It didn’t take long for users to exploit it, digitally undressing women and girls and spreading non-consensual deepfakes. But while a governmental backlash in the UK is growing, these photos are still flooding in. So how is this legal? And are we finally reaching a moment where the harms of AI can’t be brushed aside?
Update: As of this morning (9/1), X has disabled Grok’s image generation tool for non-subscribers. Grok wrote in a reply that this was done “to ensure responsible use and address recent concerns about misuse for inappropriate content.”
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Guests:
- Emma Yeomans, news reporter, The Times.
- Chris Stokel-Walker, tech journalist and author.
- Samantha Smith, columnist at The Catholic Herald.
Host: Manveen Rana.
Producers: Sophie McNulty, Harry Stott.
Read more: Elon Musk’s AI undressing tool on Grok could be banned
Further listening: Is 2026 the year of the AI backlash?
Clips: NBC News, Fox News.
Photo: Getty Images.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From The Times and the Sunday Times, this is the story. I'm Manvine Rana. |
| 0:10.0 | I was going through my comments thread on a few of my latest posts, seeing what the public mood was on a few of the topics that I was planning. |
| 0:18.0 | Writing about later in the week, and I saw under one of my |
| 0:22.1 | posts a photo of me in a black bikini. |
| 0:25.9 | That's Samantha Smith, a journalist and columnist at the Catholic Herald. |
| 0:31.3 | A few days ago, she was scrolling through X, formerly known as Twitter, when she came across |
| 0:36.7 | an AI-generated image that stopped her in her tracks. |
| 0:41.5 | It wasn't a photo that I'd taken myself, obviously, but it looked like me. It felt like me. By all appearances, it was me. |
| 0:57.3 | Samantha discussed. it was me. Samantha discovered that she was one of thousands of women who'd been digitally undressed by GROC, |
| 1:04.3 | X's AI assistant. |
| 1:06.9 | Over the past fortnight, X has been inundated with posts like this. |
| 1:12.4 | Tonight, Elon Musk's AI chatbot GROC coming under fire from regulators across the globe |
| 1:17.2 | over a rise in non-consensual and sexualized deep fake images of women and children. |
| 1:22.4 | More than 50% of images generated by GROC between December 25th and January 1st were non-consensual sexual images. |
| 1:30.3 | For Samantha, the discovery of these fake images of her online, was absolutely horrifying. |
| 1:38.3 | Just because it's AI generated, it doesn't mean that it is less real to the person who is stripped of their |
| 1:46.9 | clothes without their consent. |
| 1:48.6 | And for me, I really felt that loss of control and the objectification. |
| 1:58.6 | I felt that it was my duty to raise the red flag because if this is able to happen to me, |
| 2:10.0 | then it could be happening to anybody else, and a number of women and children could be put at risk of harm, because this is a form of abuse, it's digital abuse material. Whether or not people want to see it like that, whether or not that is their intention, if they're just following a trend at the moment, or not, it is a form of digital abuse. |
| 2:46.8 | Samantha is joining a furious cacophony of voices calling for change. |
| 2:55.7 | How is it even legal for an AI chatbot to digitally undress women and publish those images for the world to see? |
... |
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