Twitter’s Chatbot Keeps Undressing Women
ICYMI
Slate Podcasts
3.9 • 800 Ratings
🗓️ 17 January 2026
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On today’s episode, host Kate Lindsay is joined by Parker Molloy, writer of The Present Age. After Elon Musk implemented updates to his Grok chatbot that encouraged it to be more sexually explicit, certain users began directing it to publicly remove clothing from not just photos of women, but also children. In addition to being a violation of Twitter’s own policies, it’s also against the law—and yet, nobody in power is stopping it. Musk and the platform have managed to dodge any accountability for the misstep, and keep claiming to have fixed the problem without actually changing anything. Even worse, what starts as an X problem may eventually plague the rest of the internet.
This podcast is produced by Daisy Rosario, Vic Whitley-Berry, and Kate Lindsay.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, I'm Kate Lindsay, and you're listening to I-C-Y-M-I, or in case you missed it, Slate's podcast about internet culture. |
| 0:21.6 | Today on the show, we are joined by Parker Malloy. |
| 0:25.2 | Welcome, Parker. |
| 0:26.3 | Hey, it is good to be here. |
| 0:28.4 | Parker is the writer of the newsletter The Present Age. |
| 0:32.1 | It's about culture and politics, but particularly through the lens of communication and media. |
| 0:39.1 | Her recent piece is about GROC, which is Elon Musk's AI chatbot, which has been digitally undressing women and even |
| 0:45.4 | children over on X, aka Twitter. This happened over the holidays, so it is possible that you |
| 0:51.2 | listening to this either haven't heard about this at all or have heard like rumblings. |
| 0:55.6 | So it's a heavy topic today and an important one. |
| 0:59.0 | But just sort of keep that in mind as you're listening. |
| 1:01.4 | But before we dive in, let's start with something like. |
| 1:07.0 | Parker, what is your first internet memory? |
| 1:10.0 | Oh, my first internet memory. |
| 1:11.6 | It was so way back in the day when they would send out those AOL, like, |
| 1:17.6 | discs in the mail. |
| 1:19.6 | I remember I was like about 10 at the time. |
| 1:24.6 | We got one of those discs in the mail. We put it in the computer. We signed up for our AOL account. And I went to AOL keyword, keyword, keyword, something. And it was keyword Halloween. And they had like a spooky little soundboard on there. And that is my first internet memory. Wait, tell me more about this. I don't know this. |
| 1:46.1 | Oh, okay. So, because it was around Halloween. |
| 1:48.8 | Right. I'd love if it wasn't. And you were like, still I want to get into the mood. |
| 1:53.1 | It was February, but I was feeling spooky. |
| 1:57.4 | But there were, you know, it was one of those things where AOL would create these little communities of, you know, where it would be like keyword money, keyword stocks. |
... |
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