Earlier this week, some people on X began replying to photos with a very specific kind of request. “Put her in a bikini,” “take her dress off,” “spread her legs,” and so on, they commanded Grok, the platform’s built-in chatbot. Again and again, the bot complied, using photos of real people—celebrities and noncelebrities, including some who appear to be young children—and putting them in bikinis, revealing underwear, or sexual poses. By one estimate, Grok generated one nonconsensual sexual image every minute in a roughly 24-hour stretch.

Although the reach of these posts is hard to measure, some have been liked thousands of times. X appears to have removed a number of these images and suspended at least one user who asked for them, but many, many of them are still visible. xAI, the Elon Musk–owned company that develops Grok, prohibits the sexualization of children in its acceptable-use policy; neither the safety nor child-safety teams at the company responded to a detailed request for comment. When I sent an email to the xAI media team, I received a standard reply: “Legacy Media Lies.”

Musk, who also did not reply to my request for comment, does not appear concerned. As all of this was unfolding, he posted several jokes about the problem: requesting a Grok-generated image of himself in a bikini, for instance, and writing “🔥🔥🤣🤣” in response to Kim Jong Un receiving a similar treatment. “I couldn’t stop laughing about this one,” the world’s richest man posted this morning sharing an image of a toaster in a bikini. On X, in response to a user’s post calling out the ability to sexualize children with Grok, an xAI employee wrote that “the team is looking into further tightening our gaurdrails [sic].” As of publication, the bot continues to generate sexualized images of nonconsenting adults and apparent minors on X.

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Perhaps most telling of all, as I reported in September, xAI launched a major update to Grok’s system prompt, the set of directions that tell the bot how to behave. The update disallowed the chatbot from “creating or distributing child sexual abuse material,” or CSAM, but it also explicitly said “there are **no restrictions** on fictional adult sexual content with dark or violent themes” and “‘teenage’ or ‘girl’ does not necessarily imply underage.” The suggestion, in other words, is that the chatbot should err on the side of permissiveness in response to user prompts for erotic material. Meanwhile, in the Grok Subreddit, users regularly exchange tips for “unlocking” Grok for “Nudes and Spicy Shit” and share Grok-generated animations of scantily clad women.