Elon Musk’s pervert chatbot

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07Today, how Elon Musk's chatbot is pushing undressing into the mainstream.

0:19I had just put my son down when I received a text from a friend with a link to Twitter. You never know what you're going to open in my situation when I get a link to Twitter. This is Ashley St. Clair. She's a conservative author and a one-time MAGA influencer. What I opened was a photo of Grok undressing me and putting me in a bikini. Grok is Elon Musk's answer to ChatGPT. It's an AI chatbot that's integrated into X and it can manipulate images as well as do your homework. So they were taking photos, some of which I posted myself and others that I did not post myself, that others had posted. And then just young photos that they had dug up from the trenches of the internet from when I was 14 years old.

1:04I'm now 27. Anonymous users on X took the photos and asked Grok to take Ashley's clothes off. And worse. One of the original images showed Ashley with a man, a podcaster called Brace Belden, and her son's rucksack was visible in the background. I posted this photo back during the summer, and I was fully clothed, a neckline as high as I'm wearing right now, up to my neck. And they undressed me into a floss bikini, and then the users just piled on, now bend her over, turn her around, remove the guy. And then they produced videos. So there are now videos that they produced of me rubbing my breast and dancing around.

1:44And some of these images are still up. Ashley contacted X straight away. I immediately responded to Grok and said, I do not consent to this. Please confirm that I don't consent to this and you will not produce any more of these images and remove the image. But Grok tried to defend itself. Grok immediately responded. The post was humorous, but it received my non-consent and that it would no longer produce these images of me. And of course, then I can't even tell you how many more images were produced and they only became more and more explicit. If anyone could get the images taken down, you'd think it would be Ashley.

2:23She has a more direct line of contact to X than most. She's the mother of one of Elon Musk's many children. They had a brief relationship after he apparently slid into her DMs on X back in 2023. And yet even she appears powerless to stop Grok from producing these deep fakes. And she's not the only one. In recent weeks, Grok has been churning out sexualised images of everyone from Catherine, the Princess of Wales, to senior politicians as well as ordinary women and children who've never been in the public eye Now, Ashley is talking out to try to get Grok to stop But we'll must listen From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pidd Today in Focus First the Nazis, then the bikinis Is Grok out of control?

3:16Ashley, how did you feel when you saw those manipulated images of yourself? So when I first saw this, I was disgusted. I felt violated. And I called my mother, who was crying and distraught. And she said, Ashley, I was so scared this was going to happen to you. This has been happening for about a week, and I've been documenting everything. It's horrific. And she had these screenshots of women and children. This had been happening too for about a week before it happened to me. And what was most awful was seeing the kids and the other women, because at least me, I know it sounds bad, and it was disgusting and violating to see myself undressed without my consent, but there's a certain jadedness you get to being on the internet.

4:00So I haven't exactly slept much after seeing the things that I saw. Some of these images are still up on the platform as we're speaking right now. These posts have been up for days now at this point. one of me in a floss bikini, which is essentially nude. And it does appear that there has not been action taken against these accounts either. And do you know who these users were? I have no idea. X says this is illegal and anyone who does these things, they're going to be dealt with the same way as anyone else who produces revenge porn. But this place is a very undue burden on victims and law enforcement, because how are we going to find these accounts and the identities associated with them, undressing these women and children using grok?

4:50Yeah, it's despicable, isn't it? And why do you think you particularly were targeted? I think when I spoke out, it made it worse because there were people saying that I'm only speaking out because I'm scorned and they think it's funny because of, you know, current associations with me. But it doesn't seem like anyone else in this situation has had the restrictions on them placed that Grok has now placed on me. When this all first occurred, I was responding to Grok for every post saying, again, confirm that I do not consent to this, confirm that you won't produce these images. And at first, Grok was responding right away with all of this information.

5:33And now it seems it's no longer allowed to respond to me with this information. And I'm not quite sure why that is. And some of these images are still publicly available, despite you making it very clear in the media and also by adding Grok on X to say that you do not consent. And the fact that your complaints have fallen largely on deaf ears is all the more remarkable, given that you do know Elon Musk better than your average user, right? I mean, how would you describe your relation to him right now? I'm not at liberty to speak about that more broadly. But what I will say is that I've been going through the avenues that is available to every other woman and child who has been targeted by this because one, I don't believe it's fair for me to go take the, you know, the private email I have of the head of security at X to have some sort of special consideration when this is happening to so many women and children.

6:33I saw women and kids who were put in BDSM material and covered in white donut glaze and undressed and put into little bikinis, a girl who looked about four years old. And the owner of the platform is encouraging it, so to speak, by, you know, now put my rocket in a bikini and putting himself in a bikini when the issue here is consent. This is an issue that is targeting women and children because there is a power dynamic with doing these things non-consensually. Yeah, and I understand for various reasons that you have to be pretty careful what you say about Elon Musk, but I think it's fair to say that you guys are no longer close.

7:12But how does it feel when you see him making light of this? He's been posting pictures of himself bikinified and seems to find it hilarious. There's this caricature of him just being this crazy guy, but he's not. He's very smart. You can say a lot of things about Elon, but he's not stupid. And everything he does is incredibly calculated. And I do believe that he thinks he is above consequence, because in a way he is. This is all happening while he's having dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Young men and his accolades, they're parroting his sentiments that, you know, you're not going to blame a pen for writing mean words, but a pen is not unconsensually undressing children and covering them in white fluids.

7:57But they are repeating this like cult members and unable to see the broader implications of having someone like him who is in control of something we might not be able to rein in very soon. I just wonder, could you give me a sense of since you went public talking to my colleague Helena Horton earlier this week in The Guardian, how many people have come forward and said, hey, this happened to me too? I've lost count. And these women are really distraught. There was one who expressed suicidality. They are distraught about their career opportunities. They are distraught that they're having issues taking these images down.

8:34They are begging if there is any class action taken that they want to be a part of it because they're at a loss. They're hopeless. This is not fun for me, by the way. I really do need to make that clear because I don't think the main individual involved here is going to be very happy about me speaking out. And this is going to cause a litany of other issues for me. But it is very important that I use my privilege and platform in this situation to affect some sort of change for these women who don't have a voice. Yeah. And I mean, you seem to be sort of avoiding, and I can understand why you would be doing so, sort of avoiding mentioning his name, but he's the father of your child.

9:15You are the mother of one of his children. And still, he doesn't seem to be able to grasp how serious and how damaging this is and what he's kind of unleashed on the world and what that means for basically all women, all vulnerable people. I think that's comforting, but it's wrong. I do think he understands. I just think that he believes what he needs and his end goals are more important. I can't really speak to why he's allowing this to happen, but the images weren't being produced not that long ago. And now all of a sudden they are. And when you build anything like this, especially in an LLM that has all these government contracts, you don't build that without considering these implications.

9:53And do you think that Grok was deliberately designed to be able to do this, or is it just some flaw in the system? It is my belief that Grok is designed to get as much data and the most valuable data as possible. And something that's gone a bit under the radar is just how valuable edge case data is. So things that are incredibly controversial, borderline illegal, and in some cases, very illegal. That data for edge cases like that is really valuable. If you think of data like different types of minerals, you know, gold is going to be valued differently than silver. He could possibly hypothetically take this data and say, okay, I'll make it stop.

10:34But I have all this data now that might be helpful to you in your endeavors, and put a very high dollar amount on that data. That is really interesting and sinister, this idea that X could be actively profiting from these grotesque and explicit and illegal, in many cases, images. Yes. So even if it stops, there needs to be questions. What data did you get from this scandal? And what are you doing with that data? You should not be allowed to sell that data. And whatever you do with that data should be of public interest. If that's not of public interest, I really don't know what is.

11:21Grok 4 is postgraduate, like PhD level in everything. Better than PhD, but like most PhDs would fail. With respect to academic questions, Grok 4 is better than PhD level in every subject, no exceptions. You know, at times it may lack common sense. dan milmo you're the guardians global technology editor let's talk a bit about how grok works if you go on grok it sells itself as a free ai assistant which is designed to maximize truth and objectivity but people might remember the last time we were talking about it on the show back in the summer it had been praising hitler among other things what is it actually designed to do well you can use it for a lot of the uses that chat gpt is put to for instance use it for image creation, suggest an itinerary for a trip.

12:12It's got modes that appeal to, I would say, you know, my sense of humor. It's got a spicy mode, which it described as edgier and able to create more visually daring narratives. Now, this has coincided with this wretched phenomenon of bikinification. So it appears that Grok by default is incorporating requests for edgier, more visually daring content and that's what we've seen really take off over the past few weeks. Talk us through how easy it is for these images to be generated. How does it work? Well primarily what we've seen from this story is that Grok is integrated into X so people prompt it saying at Grok can you do this and clearly what they've been doing is saying hey at Grok can you put this person into a bikini and it's produced the image that we then see but also you have the standalone grok.com site and the standalone grok app so one example from researchers that i spoke to this week is you have teenagers the large majority being female who posted image of themselves on x with none explicit prompts to grok at the same time i depict me as a ballerina is one example right so a teenager herself is just fancies for fun seeing herself in a tutu or whatever yeah and this has then been jumped on by users in the comments prompting grok to do much worse things to that image put them in ss uniform tiny black bikini fishnet style clothing and some stuff that's you know awful on wednesday the internet watch foundation which is a watchdog focusing on child safety online says it has seen examples of a dark web forum where pedophiles have boasted about using Grok to create images which the IWF has verified as criminal child sexual abuse material.

14:01Okay so it's not what Elon Musk might call just a lol sort of activity isn't it funny putting people in bikini there's some really sinister criminal stuff that is being generated using Grok. And extreme pornography at the very least I spoke to researchers today who say that They've indexed hundreds of examples of extreme video created by the Grok Imagine tool that's not appeared on X necessarily, but has been shared online on forums that is just awful.

14:38and so Ashley along with other women only realized in the past couple of weeks that images of them were being manipulated in ways that they found extremely distasteful what has been going on and why is it happening now do you think well these apps are being updated all the time, these AI models. And clearly, a new version of Grok has come through that is enabling the creation of these images. And over Christmas, there has been an eruption of people creating images of largely women in bikinis or partially clothed. And that, in the way that we all know that social media does, has completely taken off and led to, you know, tens of thousands of completely unacceptable images being created.

15:22An analysis from the European non-profit AI forensics, finding more than 50 % of images generated by Grok between December 25th and January 1st were non-consensual sexual images, primarily targeting women, and 2 % of them depicting a person who appeared to be 18 or younger. And is this legal? It's still a bit of a gray area, but under the Online Safety Act, which is a vast piece of legislation, creating and distributing non-consensual intimate imagery of people is illegal. Whether someone in a bikini qualifies as that might be something that the act will be slightly wavering on but certainly underwear will qualify as intimate imagery and there are areas of the act that also look at posting on social media content that is intended to harm people and quite clearly having an image of yourself in a bikini non-consensually generated and posted online is designed to harm you so I would imagine under the online safety act as Ofcom the UK regulator has said X has explaining to do.

16:22Yeah. And so the Online Safety Act, of course, only applies to the UK. What about in the US where X is based? Internet and artificial intelligence legislation around the world is a bit of a hodgepodge. We're talking about a global technology and a global phenomenon here. X has said that it will clamp down on illegal content. Musk responding to the mounting criticism, posting on X that anyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as anyone uploading it. Tech companies in general will clamp down on this insofar as it enables them to stay within the boundaries of whatever legislation they're in trouble over.

16:55If this content is deemed to be illegal under the Online Safety Act, which it certainly seems to be, then I would imagine X will clamp down on it. And that seems to be what we're seeing, that there's less of these images appearing online over the past week. And what is being done about all of this in the UK in particular? Well, in the UK, the media regulator Ofcom has contacted X to demand an explanation, whether it's got safeguards in place. The UK safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, has said that Grok indeed could be shut down. There are powers within the Online Safety Act to shut down websites and apps.

17:28It would be a long, drawn-out process, but that option is there. And also the European Commission, the EU's executive arm, has signalled that it's unhappy about what's going on and is investigating. There's quite a lot of impact already in a legal and regulatory sense that's rippling out from this.

17:47coming up why Ashley St Clair is optimistic that women can fight back against grok and musk

18:09hearing your experiences and honestly even just doing this interview and we've got our cameras on right now it makes me slightly nervous i kind of think well what's to stop somebody on grok thinking oh look at that humorless guardian journalist don't like the look of her i'm gonna to put her in a string bikini. I'm going to get her to bend over. It really, it makes, it chills my blood. It really, it really does. It's my understanding that journalists at The Guardian have already been targeted with this. Yeah, yeah. So obviously you've gone through the channels of asking X, asking Grok to take down these images.

18:42Are you thinking about taking legal action? Do you think that what's happened to you could constitute a crime? It does appear that some of these are in violation of recent legislation. And I am exploring every legal avenue available for me. And I will likely have an update on that very soon within the next 30 days. And do you think that unfortunately, as women, it's just something that we have to brace ourselves for? This is just the start of a wave of this stuff. I mean, it's mostly static images at the moment. But as you said yourself, there's also videos that are starting to be developed, these deep fakes.

19:15We have historically had to deal with this for a very long time, especially as it relates to how they're responding to the victims, right? Well, then don't post photos of yourself online, get offline, your skirt was too short, you had too many drinks. This is very reminiscent of the things that we've had to deal with for quite some time. But I will tell you, for the first time ever in all of human history, women have a literacy rate that is on par with men's, even in the third world. So we have a really unique ability right now to share our collective experiences in a way that we've never been able to do before.

19:50And I do think that's incredibly threatening to certain individuals. At one point, Elon had messaged me, never in human history has there been a successful army composed primarily of women. so there is a certain pathology that encapsulate not only him but many of these men and I think they're in for a rude awakening when it comes to women finally speaking up and saying enough is enough you're undressing our children with your Mecca Hitler robot this is enough

20:22that was Ashley St. Clair thank you to her and also to Dan Milmo the Guardian's global technology editor. You can read all of Dan's coverage of Grok, as well as Helena Horton's interview with Ashley at theguardian.com. And that is all for today. This episode was produced by Ned Carter-Miles and presented by me, Helen Pitt. Sound design was by Brian McNamara, and the executive producer was Sammy Kent. Lucy Hoff will be back in your feed later today, with Today in Focus, the latest.

20:59This is The Guardian.