Elon Musk has tried to laugh off the issues with Grok, seeming to blame users rather than his platform.LIONEL BONAVENTURE/AFP/Getty Images

I stumbled on it by accident. I spend far less time on X, what used to be Twitter, than I did back in the day – when it was an interesting place to bat around ideas, even if it got hostile at times. Now that it’s a sludge pit of misinformation and hate-filled opinions, lurking is the best option – even if it is frequently anxiety-inducing.

If I didn’t have to lurk for my job, I wouldn’t be there at all.

But X is still, somehow, the platform of choice for much of the discourse. So lurk journalists must. I was doing just that when I recently encountered an instruction to X’s AI. “Hey Grok,” it went, “put her in a bikini.”

Huh?

This instruction appeared to be from someone who disagreed with the poster’s political views. It sent me down a rabbit hole that might have made even Hugh Hefner uncomfortable.

Grok, put me in a micro bikini. Grok, replace my clothes with clear tape.

Many of these “requests” were written as if they were coming from the posters themselves – depicted in the photos as young women, if anyone is naïve enough to believe that.

European Commission says sexualized AI images generated by X chatbot Grok are........

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