'Add blood, forced smile' How Grok's nudification AI tool went viral

A trend for the chatbot to alter pictures to show women in bikinis spiralled into hundreds of thousands of requests to create fake sexualised images, horrifying those targeted

- By Amelia Gentleman and Helena Horton

Like thousands of women across the world, Evie, a 22-year-old photographer from Lincolnshire, woke up on New Year's Day, looked at her phone and was alarmed to see that fully clothed photographs of her had been digitally manipulated by Elon Musk's AI tool, Grok, to show her in just a bikini.

The "put her in a bikini" trend began quietly at the end of last year before exploding at the start of 2026.

Within days, hundreds of thousands of requests were being made to the Grok chatbot, asking it to strip the clothes from photographs of women. The fake, sexualised images were posted publicly on X, freely available for millions of people to inspect.

Relatively tame requests by Xusers to alter photographs to show women in bikinis into increasingly explicit demands for women to be dressed in transparent bikinis, then in bikinis made of dental floss, placed in sexualised positions, and made to bend over so their genitals were visible. By 8 January, as many as 6,000 bikini demands were being made to the chatbot every hour, according to analysis conducted for the Guardian.

This unprecedented mainstreaming of nudification technology triggered instant outrage from the women affected, but it was days before regulators and politicians woke up to the enormity of the scandal. The public outcry raged for nine days before X made any substantive changes to stem the trend. By the time it acted, last Friday, degrading, non-consensual manipulated pictures of countless women had flooded the internet.

In the bikini image generated of Evie - who asked to use only her first name to avoid further abuse - she was covered in baby oil. She censored the picture, and reshared it to raise awareness of the dangers of Grok's new feature, then logged off. Her decision to highlight the problem attracted an onslaught of new abuse with users making even more disturbing sexual images of her.

"The tweet just blew up," she said.