I never imagined I would see myself nearly naked on screen. But after posting an innocent photograph of myself on X, that’s exactly what I saw when I opened my computer over the weekend. X’s artificially intelligent chatbot, Grok, had been used to digitally remove my clothing. My face and body were warped into pornographic material for the pleasure of men.
My face and body were warped into porn
My first reaction was disbelief. The second, anger. The third, a sinking, slightly nauseating realisation that this problem isn’t going away.
I was raised in a generation that was frequently lectured on the importance of social media safety. A stark warning was often repeated to us: ‘The internet never forgets!’ Once your actions are recorded online, we were told, they are out there forever. That’s right, of course. Yet, in the age of artificial intelligence, no matter how careful you are, it doesn’t matter. It’s a lesson I learned the hard way while staring at countless fake nudes of myself.
After the BBC wrote about what happened to me, some tried to point the figure at Grok. But Grok is not some rogue machine that decided to start mindlessly pumping out lewd images of innocent internet-goers. It is the newest tool deployed by men to treat women and girls as objects for sexual gratification. AI did not ‘create’ these images. People did.
Following a backlash, X has now limited photo editing using Grok to paying users. The site’s owner Elon Musk warned that ‘anyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content’. But the laws governing this type of activity are struggling to catch up with what is happening to women online.
Traditional laws protecting against non-consensual sexual images were built around the existence of an original photograph. AI circumvents this. It can generate a completely synthetic image using only publicly-available material – a face, a video, even a profile photo – and manipulate that image in a sexual manner.
Women like me, who post innocent pictures of ourselves online, are paying the price.
Pornography has normalised the idea that sex is a product, that bodies are objects, and that desire is something to be selfishly satisfied, regardless of consent or any intimate connection. Now, AI allows internet perverts to create their perfect fantasy with the click of a mouse – and there’s nothing women can do to stop them.
It is not just celebrities who suffer. As with my own experience, the vast majority of deepfake pornography targets ordinary women: their faces taken from social media, edited into sexualised scenarios, and circulated for someone else’s pleasure. I never imagined an innocuous image of myself would be manipulated into something pornographic. But I won’t be the last woman to find out the hard way.
Comments