Elon Musk, Grok and the latest misogynist invention

Thursday, 15 January 2026

Jan Jordan is emerita professor of criminology at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington.

OPINION: Reducing women to sexual objects is something we might hope was ending in the post #MeToo world. Clearly this is not the case. Instead, we continue to be confronted with an ever-expanding array of options designed to degrade women. This is not surprising given that whenever women make moves towards equality, backlash follows.

The latest misogynist invention comes courtesy of Elon Musk’s AI tool, Grok. It was only at the end of last year that users began requesting the Grok chatbot to “put her in a bikini”. In a matter of days hundreds of thousands of requests were made asking for the clothes to be removed from photographs of women, without the latter’s knowledge or consent. The resulting fake, sexualised images were posted publicly on X, available for millions to see.

The requests quickly became more extreme: make the bikinis transparent, put the woman in a sexy pose, make her bend over to expose her genitals…. Analysis conducted for the Guardian revealed that, by January 8, 6000 bikini demands were being made to the chatbot every hour.

A journalist interviewed a young woman, Evie, who woke up on New Year’s Day to find fully clothed photographs of her had been digitally manipulated by Grok. She censored the bikini-clad image and reshared it to raise awareness of the practice, an act that attracted waves of abuse.

She said: “The tweet just blew up. Since then I have had so many more made of me and every one has got a lot worse and worse. People saw it was upsetting me and I didn’t like it and they kept doing more and more.

“There’s one of me just completely naked with just a bit of string around my waist, one with a ball gag in my mouth and my eyes rolled back. The fact these were able to be generated is mental.”

Meanwhile as awareness of the tool grew, the requests made of it became increasingly extreme. Some users, mostly men, asked for the women’s bodies to have bruises added, or blood, or for them to be gagged and bound or covered in semen. By Thursday last week Grok was being asked to add bullet holes to Renee Good’s face, the woman shot dead by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.

The latter may have been a step too far, with the image generation capabilities suddenly restricted to paying subscribers. This does not end the creation or viewing of such images, and could cynically be interpreted as a revenue-raising move.

UK columnist Moira Donegan has observed that “it is not a coincidence that among many users, the first thing they thought to do with AI was to harass and degrade women, eroding their access to public life and further entrenching unjust hierarchies”.

Why, we must ask, is this the first thing many men thought of? Why does the desire to sexually humiliate and degrade women appeal to so many?

The quick answer is patriarchy, the centuries old belief system that tells men they are superior to women and entitled to own them. The longer version requires us to add in the fear and anger many men feel when women resist male control and objectification.

Since the 1970s the growth of the women’s movement has been accompanied by the expansion of pornography. The more women have sought to speak out, the more ways men have found to objectify their bodies.

In recent years the porn industry has kept expanding its repertoire of sexually violent imagery, with rough sex and choking videos becoming ever more dominant since #MeToo encouraged women to disclose their sexual victimisation. What better way to silence the woman who wants to speak out than placing your hands around her throat and strangling her?

Alarm has been expressed over the chatbot being used to undress images of children. A survivor of child sexual abuse spoke out after Grok altered an image of her as a 3-year-old to depict her in a string bikini. She identified the trend as follows: “It’s a humiliating new way of men silencing women. Instead of telling you to shut up, they ask Grok to undress you to end the argument.”

When some ministers in the UK government suggested X needed to be banned because of the situation, Musk retorted: “They just want to ban free speech.”

But whose freedom is being protected here? Certainly not that of the women and children whose clothes are removed for the sick enjoyment of others. An online child safety campaigner claimed that, “if any other consumer product caused this level of harm, it would already have been recalled”.

Outrage has been expressed by many over the sexually explicit images of real women generated by Grok, including British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and some US Democrat Senators. Meanwhile Indonesia has become the first country to formally ban access to the chatbot.

Grok is the latest technological manifestation of misogyny. As well as removing clothes, it removes any pretensions we might have regarding advances towards gender equality. This latest fashion exposes how resistant we remain as a society to respecting women’s rights and freedoms, and how strongly we remain invested in maintaining the male gaze in a man’s world.

Even if moves are made to restrict Grok, other nudification apps remain available. These are used to titillate, humiliate, shame and defame women, disregarding their autonomy and violating their right to consent.

And we wonder why rape remains so prevalent in a world that refuses to accept women have the right to say no.

Jan Jordan has researched extensively the impacts of our patriarchal legacy for women and sexual violence, her publications including Tackling Rape Culture: Ending Patriarchy, (Routledge, 2022) and Snorkelling the Abyss: One woman, striving to survive, fighting for survivors (Cuba Press, 2023).