“The sexualisation of women is only appealing if it’s non-consensual. Otherwise, it’s ‘sluttiness’,” American writer and comedian Lindy West wrote in a 2013 essay. More than a decade later, that observation feels less like commentary and more like diagnosis.

On X (formerly Twitter), a section of users have been using the platform’s AI chatbot Grok to digitally undress women whose photographs are publicly available online, replacing their clothes with bikinis or other sexualised imagery. The prompts (“@grok remove her clothes and put her in a bikini”) are often typed casually, even flippantly, beneath the original photographs, inviting Grok to comply while others look on. 

The output is not framed as pornographic, nor is it used to extort, as such ‘morphed’ images typically are. Rather, it is meant for humiliation, generated “for fun”, rooted in the knowledge that the women depicted did not consent. And the lack of consent here, it would seem, is precisely the point.

What Grok has made visible now is not a new sexual appetite, but an old power dynamic that has found a new method of automation. The thrill here does not lie in desire, but in domination. It lies in the ability to take a woman’s image, strip it of context and agency, and return it to her, and to the public, as an object.

xAI, the artificial intelligence company founded by Elon Musk who now owns X, has since acknowledged that Grok’s safeguards failed in a visible way. The chatbot publicly conceded that “images depicting minors in minimal clothing” were generated after user prompts, and said improvements were underway to block such requests entirely. xAI’s response leaned on a familiar corporate alibi that “no system is 100% foolproof.”

When large numbers of users independently fall upon the same act of violation, it becomes clear that this is not fringe or isolated behaviour. It is now platform culture. 

Why clothes are the first to go

In public life, clothing is not incidental. It signals legitimacy for a person, often even the role they play in society as a professional, whether they be an actor, a journalist, or a student. Stripping their clothes away and replacing them with swimwear or fetishised outfits collapses that legitimacy into exposure. The aim is not to make the women they are targeting attractive by making them wear “sexualised” clothes. It is about making them interruptible, reminding them that no matter what........

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