By Amelia Gentleman,Helena Horton
Publication Date: 2026-01-11 06:00:00
Like thousands of women around the world, Evie, a 22-year-old photographer from Lincolnshire, woke up on New Year’s Day, looked at her phone and was alarmed to discover that fully clothed photos of her had been digitally manipulated by Elon Musk’s AI tool Grok to show her only in a bikini.
The “dress her in a bikini” trend began quietly late last year before exploding in early 2026. Within a few days, hundreds of thousands of requests were sent to the Grok chatbot asking to take photos of women undressed. The fake, sexualized images were publicly posted on X and freely accessible to millions of people.
Relatively tame requests from X users to alter photos to show women in bikinis quickly evolved hour by hour in the first week of the year into increasingly explicit demands that women wear transparent bikinis, then floss bikinis, be placed in sexualized positions and forced to bend over so their…