Grok had been generating sexually explicit images of people for some time. But the issue got widespread attention in late December as people used the chatbot to edit a high volume of existing images by tagging the bot in comments and giving it prompts such as "put her in a bikini." While Grok did not respond to all of the requests, it obliged in many cases. In some cases, Bellingcat senior investigator and researcher Kolina Koltai noted, users can get Grok to generate frontal nudes.
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 X users to alter photographs to show women in bikinis, rapidly evolved during the first week of the year, hour by hour, into increasingly explicit demands for women to be dressed in transparent bikinis, then in bikinis made of dental floss,