Elon Musk & Grok Celebrate Their War On Women

---

Support CleanTechnica’s work through a Substack subscription or on Stripe.

---

50 years ago, one of the results of the so-called “women’s movement” was an increase in the number of women graduating from law school and becoming licensed attorneys. The law at the time was a bastion of white male power and it is fair to say not all of those people welcomed the addition of women to the bar.

One crusty old judge I knew harrumphed, “Men act; women are acted upon.” The ultimate put-down one attorney I knew had for male lawyers he thought were too progressive was, “He sits to piss.”

Grok Sexualizes Young Women

I have written extensively lately on how AI — incorrectly known as artificial intelligence — is being used to damage society. There are obvious benefits to be sure — especially in the field of medicine — but there are also obvious dangers, particularly to women and children. It saddens me to say that one of the worst offenders is Elon Musk, the richest person in human history.

Today, he mimics the megalomania of his hero — Donnie Demented — who told the New York Times this week that the only limit to his power is his own morality. Sadly, the man has the morals of an alley cat and has been convicted of assaulting E. Jean Carroll. A frequent companion to Jeffrey Epstein, he once said they had something in common — they both preferred girls “on the younger side.”

Every organization reflects the values of its leader. Musk is the leader of xAI, which has created an AI chatbot called Grok — revealing once again Musk’s fascination with fantasy over reality. Grok is a made-up word created by author Robert Heinlein for his science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land.

Non-Consensual Nudification

In today’s edition of Bloomberg’s Tech In Depth, Olivia Solon reports that Grok has turned “non-consensual nudification into a built-in feature.” Make no mistake. The reason this is happening is because Elon wants it to happen. He is the boss. He sets the tone. And when you work for Elon, you do what he says or you work somewhere else.

Solon relates how Grok this year has been “churning out sexualized fake images of people — mostly women — enabling a form of digital abuse for well over a week. Thousands of people, including children, have now been ‘nudified’ by Grok’s so-called ‘spicy mode.” Spicy mode? Jeffrey Epstein would have loved that!

“Users of X have been asking Grok to strip away clothing from images posted to the platform, with prompts like “@grok bikini now,” or to rearrange the posture of the people in the photo. Grok responds within seconds, making its output available to X’s audience of millions.” During a 24-hour period last week it was creating 6,700 sexually suggestive or undressed images every hour — 84 times more than were created by the other the top five nudifying sites combined. The following day, that number rose to 9,500, Solon says.

“The result has been a flood of non-consensual sexualized images of real people including politicians, celebrities, journalists and — it merits repeating — children. Scroll through the replies from Grok’s official account, and you will find deepfakes of Sweden’s Deputy Prime Minister Ebba Busch, Ashley St. Clair (the mother of one of Musk’s many children) and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Some of the pictures have a ‘donut glaze’ added to their bodies or faces.”

AI Forensics, which is based in Paris, identified even more explicit Grok-generated material that did not appear on X, including hundreds of pornographic depictions of women. Its researchers reported 67 of the explicit images to French prosecutors because the subjects appear to be children.

The Objectification Of Women

Denigrating women is a key component of the MAGA playbook, which suggests that every woman should be a traditional wife — no woman wants to be unmarried, does she? —  who stays home and dutifully raises children, then submits her body to her lord and master when he returns home. Let’s go back to the days when women could not vote or have a bank account in their own name.

It reminds me of a line from a song that goes like this: “Hard luck is the fortune of all womankind. They’re always controlled; they’re always confined. Controlled by their parents until they’re a wife, and then slaves to their husbands the rest of their lives.” That could be the MAGA theme song. Peter Thiel and his tech bro buddies like Elon Musk would love it.

Solon writes, “Anyone who hasn’t been living on the Moon — or daydreaming about life on Mars — will know that every digital innovation has brought with it new and creative ways to stalk, harass, and silence women. Yes, men can be doxxed and dogpiled too, but women are 27 times more likely to be targeted.”

No Guardrails

Sophie Mortimer, manager of the Revenge Porn Helpline, a British nonprofit that supports victims of intimate image abuse, told Solon, “This is a perfect example of what happens if you let these technologies run riot without any guardrails, without the safety-by-design piece.”

Mortimer explained that X is an industry partner with StopNCII.org, which her organization developed to prevent the non-consensual sharing of images that were taken in an intimate setting — better known as revenge porn. The program allows individuals to submit photos, which are then turned into digital fingerprints — known in the industry as hashes — which are then shared with industry partners — including X — that have agreed to remove the content and block it from being uploaded again. “It’s hard to see how Grok’s spicy mode squares with those commitments,” Solon writes.

In another example of how Elon Musk controls the narrative at the companies he runs, when Solon reached out to xAI for a comment, she got the same response every other journalist gets from those organizations today — “Legacy Media Lies.” That’s Musk in a nutshell (“nutshell” being a particularly apt description, don’t you agree?) How is he any different from the neighborhood Peeping Tom on a grand scale?

Just like Donnie Demented, he recognizes no limits on his vision and brooks no challenge to his supposed omniscience. According to news reports, he dined with his mentor at Mar-A-Loco just hours before the invasion of Argentina began.

We’re Looking Into It

One person at X did tell Solon that the company was “looking into” tightening its safeguards. It does appears to have taken down some of the images, especially those depicting children. Online platforms are legally required to remove child sexual abuse material, which Elon probably views as a breach of his ability to be a “free speech absolutist.” Like all megalomaniacs, he seems to believe there should be no limits placed on what he says, while he works furiously to limit the speech of those who disagree with him.

By Friday, after widespread condemnation from policymakers, regulators, and AI safety advocates, X limited Grok’s image generation capabilities to paid subscribers, but why paid subscribers should be allowed to objectify women using AI tools provided by Musk is a question few have asked and no one has answered.

Officials in the UK, Ireland, India, and the EU have registered alarm at the volume of semi-nude images. Many of them portray their subjects in bikinis or underwear but others present them with a “donut glaze,” a semi-transparent effect that depicts their bodies with a computer generated gauzy effect.

A Justice Department spokesperson told NBC News that the agency “takes AI-generated child sex abuse material extremely seriously and will aggressively prosecute any producer or possessor of CSAM.” But the spokesperson indicated the department was more inclined to prosecute individuals who ask for CSAM, rather than those who develop and own the bot that creates it.

“We continue to explore ways to optimize enforcement in this space to protect children and hold accountable individuals who exploit technology to harm our most vulnerable,” the spokesperson said. Can you say “bureaucratic doublespeak?”

An Open Letter

Last week, Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, and Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico sent an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai asking those companies to “enforce” terms of service they claim ban the activity that was surging on X and is still possible on Grok.

In a statement Friday, Wyden emphasized that the changes on X do not address concerns that Grok is still flooding social media feeds with the non-consensual sexual imagery. “All X’s changes do is make some of its users pay for the privilege of producing horrific images on the X app, while Musk profits from the abuse of children,” he said in a statement to NBC News.

The upshot of all this is that denigrating and objectifying women is good business. Last week, xAI celebrated a spike in engagement that followed other good news — the completion of a new $20 billion funding round. Reportedly, xAI is spending $1 billion a month to stay in operation, so those new funds should carry it into 2027.

The more important question is whether the hundreds of billions being spent to bring AI into the mainstream will create profits or simply solidify the stranglehold on society of a digital police state. When it comes to AI, this old expression seems particularly relevant: “Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it!”