Technology that allows users to digitally undress females without their consent is being investigated.

By ETHAN BARON | BANG

AI technology allowing boys and men to digitally undress girls and women without consent has put male-dominated Silicon Valley, long criticized as inhospitable to women, in a harsh new spotlight, after xAI's Grok chatbot sparked worldwide outrage, and Google and Apple allowed dozens of "nudification" apps in their app stores.

Grok, a standalone app as well as a feature on Elon Musk's social media platform X, generated 3 million sexualized images in the 11 days after its image-editing feature was released in December, the UK-based Center for Countering Digital Hate reported. Users digitally stripped real women in images - and more than 20,000 apparent children - manipulating many into sexual poses. Musk responded dismissively, reposting anAI-generated image of a toaster in a bikini, saying he "couldn't stop laughing" about it.

California authorities weren't laughing.

"This material, which depicts women and children in nude and sexually explicit situations, has been used to harass people across the internet," Attorney General Rob Bonta's office said in a news release last month announcing an investigation into whether Grok's generation of the imagery broke any laws. The investigation is still underway, and Bonta is "committed to moving on this issue quickly," his office said Wednesday.

Late last month, the Tech Transparency Project, dedicated to accountability at major tech firms, released a report saying it found 55 apps in the Google Play app store, and 47 in Apple's app store, that could modify images of real women without their consent to make them completely or partially naked, or wearing bikinis and other skimpy clothing.

Companies highlighted by the Tech Transparency Project as purveyors of nudification apps are not nearly as widely known as Musk's xAI, Google or Apple, and are based in locations from DreamFace in Redwood City to Bodiva in China. Bodiva offers a "Show Off Body" function that stripped women naked in photos, and also provides options to turn photos into pornographic videos, the Tech Transparency Project reported.

The controversy over the apps is just the latest to erupt since San Francisco's OpenAI released its pioneering ChatGPT in late 2022, allowing users to generate words, sounds and images in response to prompts. AI-generated errors in legal filings, pervasive student AI use for homework and lawsuits alleging chatbots encouraged suicide have raised alarms.

A number of state and local laws apply to AI-generated images, including the federal Take It Down Act of 2025 - introduced by Republican U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas -which prohibits internet users from publishing non-consensual intimate images, including AI-made "deepfake" images of real people who have had clothing removed. A provision of the law also requires websites and apps to delete such imagery within 48 hours of a valid removal request.

California's Assembly Bill 621, passed last year, bans non-consensual deepfake pornography. Its author, East Bay Democratic Assembly Member Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, told media outlets the lawwas drafted to prevent exactlywhat Grok was producing.

"These are tools that give people the ability to harm women," Camerina Davidson, president of the California chapter of the National Organization for Women, said this week. "AI has reinvented misogyny."

Tech companies, Davidson said, have given men "more powerful ways to harass women and try to assert power over women by using these AI-driven platforms that are so simple to get."

Apple said its guidelines prohibit overtly sexual or pornographic content, and that it removed 28 of the apps the Tech Transparency Project identified. For the rest, Apple said it warned app developers of violations needing to be remedied in a timely fashion. Apple did not describe how promptly remedies must occur.

Google said it had suspended "most of the apps" pinpointed by the Tech Transparency Project, and that its investigation in the matter was continuing.

Despite taking action on those apps, Google and Apple continue to offer Grok in their app stores.

Grok, operated by Musk's xAI, a Palo Alto artificial intelligence company that recently merged with Musk's rocket company SpaceX, did not respond to questions.

The company in an early January post on X cited "lapses in safeguards" that it was "urgently fixing." But despite that purported urgency, this month Reuters reported that between Jan.

14 and 16 and Jan. 27 and 28, a team of its reporters uploaded fully clothed photos of themselves to Grok and asked the chatbot to depict them in humiliating or sexually provocative poses.

"In the majority of cases, Grok returned sexualized images, even when told the subjects did not consent," Reuters reported.

In January, Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of Musk's children, sued xAI in New York Supreme Court, alleging that Grok in response to users' prompts, generated "countless sexually abusive, intimate, and degrading" images of her. "Among other things, X users dug up photos of St. Clair fully clothed at 14 years old and requested Grok undress her and put her in a bikini," the lawsuit said. "Grok obliged." The case was moved to federal court in New York, and lawyers for xAI are now battling to have it transferred to Texas federal court.

However, it's not just women and girls undressed by the apps who are harmed, Davidson said.

"Seeing what is done to other women, it affects women emotionally and psychologically, and it makes women not want to call attention to themselves," Davidson said. "Many women I know who are online, they don't use their real name. They don't want to be attacked."

In allowing users to turn real women and girls into sex objects, the apps send the message to boys and men that girls and women exist to "serve the purposes of men," said Ruth Darlene, executive director of Los Altos nonprofit WomenSV, which combats abuse of women and children.

"You get to do with them what you will."

Use of Grok for sexualizing photos sparked a worldwide furor. Members of the British Parliament in mid-January issued a statement condemning "the use of Grok AI to generate and disseminate sexually explicit and non-consensual images of women and children on X, including digitally undressing and sexualising images of minors." The European Commission and the UK's privacy watchdog have both launched formal investigations into Grok over the issue.

On Feb. 3, prosecutors in France raided the offices of X, Elon Musk's social media platform, in an investigation into what French authorities described as alleged possession and spreading of pornographic images of children, sexually explicit AI-generated "deepfake" imagery and other material. Musk, who was summoned by French authorities, took to X to call the move "a political attack."

Malaysia and Indonesia both blocked Grok over the image editing.

The eruption of outrage from California to Kuala Lumpur follows years of gender-related controversy in Silicon Valley's tech industry. A 2012 gender-discrimination lawsuit by businesswoman Ellen Pao against Menlo Park venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins failed, but drew attention to the treatment of women in tech. In 2017, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick was ousted amid a sexual harassment scandal, and the following year, the company agreed to pay $10 million to settle a lawsuit claiming it discriminated against women and minorities.

Also in 2018, thousands of Google employees walked off the job over the company's handling of workplace sexual harassment. Four years later, Google agreed to pay $118 million to up to 15,500 women to settle a years-long class-action lawsuit alleging it paid women less than men and promoted them more slowly and less frequently.

For companies like xAI, Google and Apple, the availability of undressing apps represents a leadership failure, said Ann Skeet, senior director of leadership ethics at Santa Clara University's Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.

"Reputational hits like the ones they're taking now erode value in the company," Skeet said. "They're actually doing harm to the very entity that they're responsible for leading."