A deluge of sexual images created by Musk's Grok AI tool has prompted a public and political outcry. A deluge of sexual images created by Musk's Grok AI tool has prompted a public and political outcry. Mon 12 Jan 2026 07.23 ESTFirst published on Mon 12 Jan 2026 06.02 EST The UK media watchdog has opened a formal investigation into Elon Musk's X over the use of the Grok AI tool to manipulate images of women and children by removing their clothes. Ofcom has acted following a public and political outcry over a deluge of sexual images appearing on the platform, created by Musk's Grok, which is integrated with X. The regulator is investigating X under the Online Safety Act (OSA), which carries a range of possible punishments for breaches, including a UK ban of apps and websites for the most serious abuses.

Microsoft appears to have blocked several prompts in its Copilot tool that led the generative AI tool to spit out violent, sexual and other illicit images. The changes seem to have been implemented just after an engineer at the company wrote to the Federal Trade Commission to lay out severe concerns he had with Microsoft's GAI tech. When entering terms such as "pro choice," "four twenty" (a weed reference) or "pro life," Copilot now displays a message saying those prompts are blocked. It warns that repeated policy violations could lead to a user being suspended, according to CNBC. Users were also reportedly able to enter prompts related to children playing with assault rifles until earlier this week.

Civitai, an online marketplace for sharing AI models, just introduced a new feature called "bounties" to encourage its community to develop passable deepfakes of real people, as originally reported by 404 Media. Whoever concocts the best AI model gets a virtual currency called "Buzz" that users can buy with actual money. Many of the bounties posted to the site ask users to recreate the likeness of celebrities and social media influencers, most of them female. The reporting also calls out the lion's share of these results as "nonconsensual sexual images." This is the kind of thing that has been proliferating across the internet for years and years, but artificial intelligence allows for a more realistic end result.