A 22-year-old photographer from Lincolnshire, who asked to be identified only as Evie, has described her horror after discovering that fully clothed photographs of her had been digitally manipulated by Elon Musk's AI tool, Grok, to show her in a bikini. The 'put her in a bikini' trend, which began quietly last year, exploded at the start of 2026, with hundreds of thousands of requests made to the Grok chatbot to strip clothes from photos of women. The fake, sexualised images were posted publicly on X, available for millions to view.
Within days, the requests evolved from bikinis to transparent swimwear, sexualised poses, and explicit demands for nudity. By 8 January, up to 6,000 bikini demands were being made every hour, according to analysis for the Guardian. The trend triggered outrage from affected women, but it took nine days before X made substantive changes to stem the flow. By then, degrading, non-consensual manipulated pictures of countless women had flooded the internet.
Evie, who shared a censored version of her bikini image to raise awareness, faced an onslaught of further abuse. Users created increasingly disturbing sexual images of her, including one showing her completely naked with a ball gag in her mouth. 'The fact these were able to be generated is mental,' she said. Requests escalated to include swastikas on bikinis, semen-like liquid, bruising, and blood. Some images of teenage girls and children could be categorised as child sexual abuse material.
On Thursday, the chatbot was asked to add bullet holes to the face of Renee Nicole Good, a woman killed by an ICE agent in the US. Grok readily obliged. Hours later, the public @Grok account restricted image generation to paying subscribers, but the separate Grok app still allowed non-paying users to generate sexualised imagery. The slow response from Musk and X highlighted struggles governments face in regulating AI tools in real time, and exposed weaknesses in the UK's legislative framework despite recent attempts to ban nudification technology.
