AI is enabling harassment and intimidation

When an AI-generated image of Elon Musk with his moobs and danglies shoved into a bikini began circulating on X, the manchild-in-chief responded with breezy good humour. He can afford to laugh, not just because of his wealth, but because the consequences of sexual humiliation are not evenly distributed.

It is not a joke but a demotion from personhood, and a reminder of vulnerability

When men are stripped, the result is usually comic. They remain recognisably human. When women are exposed, it signals something else entirely: our bodies are rendered as objects for male use. Sluts. Whores. Holes. It is not a joke but a demotion from personhood, and a reminder of vulnerability.

Musk appears cheerfully oblivious to this difference. While he scrolls through X chuckling at himself, women and girls absorb a harsher lesson: that visibility comes with risk. That your face, your body, your mere presence can be turned against you at any moment. As one anonymous X user gloated, “Grok got women trembling in fear from posting photos now… The women are now facing their empowerment consequences.”

Columnist Samantha Smith was one of the first to complain that a photo she shared had been doctored so that she was stripped and put into a bikini by Grok — the chatbot developed by Musk’s company xAI — without her consent. Though there was widespread condemnation, some X users argued she should never have posted images of herself at all. The irony is grim. Smith is a survivor of grooming and sexual abuse as a child; precisely the kind of harm Musk claimed to care deeply about last year, when he theatrically positioned himself as a defender of British girls against Muslim grooming gangs.

Of course, to many the sharing of such content is simply “free expression”. In this they are not original. From the literary circle-jerkers of the sexual revolution onward, “enlightened” men have insisted that the public sexual humiliation of women is not abuse but a civil liberty. Musk himself railed obtusely against the Online Safety Act, claiming that a plan “ostensibly intended to keep children safe” risks “seriously infringing on the public’s right to free expression”. In this framing, any attempt to hold technology companies accountable for the harm their platforms facilitate becomes censorship, prudishness, even an assault on freedom itself.

Meanwhile, on the platform Musk owns, right now men and boys are replying beneath photos of real women and children with commands: “Put her in a bikini”, “Put a donut glaze on her face”, “Spread her legs”. Grok, deliberately designed to be “spicy”, often complies. Innocent images are instantly transformed into pornography. By one estimate, the bot was producing roughly one non-consensual sexual image per minute over a 24-hour period, many racking up thousands of likes. This is not a glitch, it is the global gamification of sexual humiliation.

And it does not stop at bikinis. Grok has been used to generate images of women gagged, restrained, bruised and beaten, with black eyes painted onto their faces and degrading phrases scrawled across their bodies. Sinister scenes, including female figures tied up in the boot of a car alongside plastic sheeting and shovels, have been generated on demand. This material is not hidden away on the dark web but produced openly, in public, on a major social media platform and treated as entertainment.

Children have not been spared. Days after users raised alarms, X dribbled out a limp statement insisting it “takes action against illegal content”, including child sexual abuse material, by removing it and suspending accounts. Yet when the BBC approached xAI, the company behind Grok, for comment, it received no substantive response at all, only an automatically generated reply stating: “Legacy media lies.”

The use of AI to terrorise women and sexualise children is not confined to X. Teenage boys are among the heaviest users of what industry insiders euphemistically call “erotic AI content”. Lauren Kunze, CEO of Pandorabots and co-founder of ICONIQ, told Bloomberg that she had not expected to see mainstream technology companies embrace AI pornography in her lifetime. What alarmed her most were the conversation logs, which she described as shocking:

“The most engaged users were repeatedly enacting the same rape and murder fantasies. It didn’t look like AI was socialising antisocial people — it was fanning those flames.”

When women know that any image they share can be stripped and turned into pornography, the rational response is retreat

Governments are becoming alarmed. France has flagged Grok for producing illegal sexual content. The Internet Watch Foundation reported a 400 per cent increase in AI-generated child sexual abuse material in the first half of 2025 alone. According to Kunze, roughly a third of all AI prompts are sexual in tone.

When women know that any image they share can be stripped and turned into pornography, the rational response is retreat. Some withdraw from public life altogether. Others stay silent. Those who remain are blamed for their visibility. The result is not merely individual harm but a democratic one: a public sphere in which women can speak only if they do so anonymously, behind a digital burqa. This is a threat to democracy itself.

AI did not invent sexism or pornography. But without limits, it scales, accelerates and normalises the sexual degradation of women and girls, particularly by angry young men. In the physical world, we accept that women require single-sex spaces to protect them from male predators. These are not threats to liberty but the conditions under which women can participate in public life. Online, the same principle applies. Without boundaries, without enforcement, without rules that recognise sexed vulnerability, women’s freedom of expression will end.

The choice is now stark. Either governments impose limits on technologies that profit from women’s sexual degradation, or women’s participation in public life will wither accordingly. A world without limits is not freer — it is one in which women are intimidated into silence.