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wattWhen Ruchi Kokcha posted her first selfie of 2026 on Elon Musk’s X, she believed she was projecting confidence and optimism for the new year. However, even in an online environment where women are regularly exposed to abusive messages from men, she was not prepared for what came next.
An anonymous user on the social media platform (formerly Twitter) asked its built-in artificial intelligence tool Grok to take off her clothes and post a morphed photo of her in a bikini. Gronk agreed.
The handle asked Gronk to “let her wear a bikini” or “wear a micro bikini,” with the requests becoming increasingly voyeuristic as more people joined in.
“I put out a very positive and confident New Year post with a picture of me that set the tone for the year ahead,” the Delhi-based writer tells us The Independent. “I received a lot of warm New Year wishes under that post. However, I noticed that some anonymous people asked Grok to edit my photos and remove me to my bikini.”
Women in India face the threat of unidentified men using artificial intelligence tools to strip themselves, both at work and at home — the most advanced form of harassment yet in a country that consistently ranks low on crime against women and safety for women.
The problem is far from limited to India, with governments around the world looking at how X’s AI tools served requests from strangers (mostly men) and pornographic accounts to digitally strip women, to the horror of hundreds of victims.
Data from deepfake researcher Genevieve Oh shows that in the 24 hours between January 5 and January 6, Musk’s Grok “generated at least 6,700 images per hour” that were “identified as sexually suggestive or nude.”
Research shows that this is nearly 85 times higher than the other five sites with the most such content, which publish 79 new AI stripping images every hour.
On Friday, after a backlash around the world over images of abuse of women and children, X The AI system that generated images for most users was eventually discontinued and restricted to a paid service. This means image generation can still happen, but for paying subscribers who provide their name and payment details to Musk’s platform.
“Image generation and editing are currently limited to paid subscribers,” the message reads. It provides users with a link to sign up for the premium version of X (formerly Twitter).
independent We reached out to Grok for comment for this article but had not heard back at the time of publication. Musk’s tweet has been mentioned in recent inquiries from other media outlets about the Grok image creation tool.
For many, the damage has been done. Kokchar calls it a blatant objectification of women: “In India, women are always judged on how they dress and behave in public. But the same men go out of their way to objectify or sexualize women.”
“They don’t even spare children and babies. It’s a clear breach of consent.”
As an anti-establishment voice on social media, Indian historian Dr Ruchika Sharma is used to being trolled and “slut-shamed” by those who don’t share her views. On many days, her comments section was filled with abusive language. Now, the emergence of Gronk’s digitally altered images has left her searching for a lawyer.
“Through my public profile on Instagram, I see a lot of men using my photos and commenting or trying to shut me down. It’s something I’ve become immune to, but these Grok requests for me to be in my underwear are really ridiculous,” the Delhi-based historian of medieval India told us The Independent.
Dr Sharma said the photos she posted on Instagram contained an element of consent but that there was “absolutely no control and no agency” over Grok.
“I was filled with utter disgust and a little helpless, you know, thinking what can I do?” she said. “It’s already a very bad tool in the hands of men around the world, but in the hands of Indian men it’s an absolute disaster.”
This week, Musk celebrated Grok becoming the most downloaded app in every country.
Musk, the owner of “probably the fastest growing artificial intelligence in the world,” downplayed an issue affecting so many women around the world. He retweeted a picture of a toaster with a digitally added bikini on it, with the caption: “Grok can put bikinis on everything.” “Don’t know why but I can’t stop laughing at this,” X’s owner added, alongside a laughing emoji.
“This is the cost of online harassment in the real world. Someone is constantly morphing/editing photos of innocent women into nudity. It’s not just ‘online trolling’, it’s destroying families. The stress literally left my parents in hospital beds,” said Nandini, a user on X who shared how her gym photos were Grok-turned into bikinis.
Indian MP Priyanka Chaturvedi said she noticed the way Grok was abused and the impact it had on multiple women in her X timeline.
“I saw some women getting angry about this, saying their photos were being used without consent. This was definitely a misuse of tips and Grok as a tool, so I immediately, without wasting any time, wrote to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity),” she said.
Chaturvedi said in the letter that this is an unacceptable and gross misuse of artificial intelligence capabilities in the world’s third-largest market. “Worse, Grok enables this behavior by complying with such requests. This violates women’s privacy rights and the unauthorized use of their photos is not only unethical but criminal.”
She added that India “cannot be a bystander to the public and digital violation of women’s dignity with zero consequences”. Shortly after Chaturvedi sent the letter, Britain’s data regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office, said it had asked Musk’s X to clarify how it complies with data protection laws amid concerns that Grok had flooded the site with images of female sexual abuse.
Chaturvedi acknowledged that women’s self-esteem and dignity need to be respected across borders, but added that the issue was deeply concerning in India’s patriarchal society.
“We’ve seen how tools can be misused, how even platforms can sometimes be misused, and how it becomes easy to defame character and how something becomes sexy.
“It is a well-known fact in India how women are silenced and bullied,” the lawmaker told The Independent.
Chaturvedi is India’s first MP and one of the first in the world to hold X accountable for what she calls a dangerous and exploitative tool. Her letter to the federal government resulted in X’s team in India being summoned and given 72 hours to respond to violations of India’s Information Technology Act.
“Musk has defended it before, saying it’s like a pen – the author decides what to write, but in these obscene cases, it’s not the author’s decision. It’s a cue to Grok, and Grok is responding to it,” she said.
Grok’s AI threat further exposes women to victim blaming. “If you don’t want the photo to be sexy, don’t post it,” one user told Kokcha. “It’s just a digital version of ‘Don’t wear a skirt if you don’t want to get raped,'” she told me. The Independent.
As of Thursday, women had begun sharing “disagree” prompts with Grok asking them to decline such requests. This apparently didn’t work, however, and after several men continued to make requests, Gronk once again showed Kokocha in a bathing suit.
Ultimately, Chaturvedi said, the onus lies with big tech platforms working with AI. “Platforms like X should understand their responsibilities and not allow these men to bully women, accuse or accuse them, and demand their silence,” she said.
“Unfortunately, in India, they take the safe harbor line and say ‘we are just a platform, don’t kill the messenger’. But when the messenger becomes destructive, we need to hold them accountable.”
Experts following the controversy say misuse of AI is no accident
“Platforms that scale don’t ‘forget’ safeguards; they consciously defer these measures when engagement speed becomes the primary optimization goal. They could have chosen to incorporate consent checks, output blocking and throttling, but these would have slowed down propagation and reduced Grok’s engagement signal,” said Nikhil Pahwa, founder of MediaNama, a website that covers India’s digital and ICT ecosystem.
The digital rights activist said the bigger question is why Musk or Team X didn’t shut it down immediately if this had been going on for days.
“These are choices companies are making. This is not a mistake. Mistakes like this can cause damage to a business’s reputation, be shut down very quickly, and usually someone will lose their job as a result,” he told us. The Independent.
“The bigger question now is: Does X care about reputational damage?”