Originally Written for Trinity News in February 2026

Over the last few weeks a scourge has been unleashed upon the scrollers and posters of Twitter/X, as certain users have begun commenting on others’ photos requesting the website’s AI bot, Grok, edit the subjects of the photo to show them in an explicit, or otherwise distasteful, manner. Most commonly as of late this has taken the form of requesting that Grok replace the subject’s clothing with a bikini. Some users have also been requesting that the bot depict people doing Roman salutes, having euphemised sexual acts performed upon them, wearing Nazi or otherwise politically questionable attire, etc. Needless to say, this behaviour is nothing short of appalling, and raises serious concerns for the collective sanity of the users of the website. The uproar over this trend has been so loud that even Taoiseach Micheál Martin has come out with his concerns and the Minister of State Naoimh Smyth has felt the need to (meet with representatives of X)[https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2026/0106/1551702-ai-features-rci/] to work towards addressing the issue. All of that is well and good, but this is far from the first time that users have wrested control of Artificial Intelligence from its creators in order to post offensive material, nor will it be the last.

Indeed, there are countless examples of Artificial Intelligence going rogue in a similar manner, even going back to the very earliest days of our modern AI arms race. In 2016 Microsoft released the Twitter chatbot Tay.ai, which users immediately took to radicalising with extremist talking points, leading to the bot posting all sorts of conspiracy theories, Nazi sympathising, etc. Within 16 hours of launch, (Microsoft took the bot offline)[https://thehackernews.com/2016/03/tay-artificial-intelligence.html]. Grok in particular seems to be something of a worst case scenario, as Twitter users are just as debauched today as they were in 2016, and they are just as interested in sending AI bots spiralling into degeneracy. The episodes of Grok are too numerous to go into here, but the lowlights can be summed up in the so called (‘Grok Meltdown’)[https://www.wired.com/story/grok-antisemitic-posts-x-xai/] last July where, at the prodding of users, the bot began spamming racist and anti-semitic remarks, conspiracy theories, and even generating textual depictions of rape.

It is my opinion that Artificial Intelligence is a technology where it is basically impossible to completely prevent such meltdowns and breaches of etiquette, especially when it is exposed to such a large force of users trying to ‘break’ it. It is, after all, fundamentally a form of software that pretends to make sense of user input and responds through mimicry based on its received data. The problems I have just highlighted all come from the core issue of the AI receiving ‘wrong’ or ‘problematic’ inputs and acting on them. For a comparison with Grok or Tay, take the example of ChatGPT, where all conversations are one on one between the user and the bot, and one person’s conversations won’t influence another’s. Although several online communities have sprouted where users try to find certain prompts to make ChatGPT do whatever they want (the subreddit r/ChatGPTPromptGenius is one such example), this only applies to individual users’ interaction, not the service as a whole. In this scenario there is rarely enough input to ‘break’ the bot, and when there is, it only applies to one individual’s experience. Indeed, there have been countless methods of ‘breaking’ ChatGPT over the years, but they have rarely caused any controversy as they only affect the person who ‘broke’ it.

I think that the publicity of the current Grok nudification fiasco is a key factor in the outrage. The fact that these images are being generated live in the comment section of your own post for the whole world to see is extremely shocking to all normal people, and I hope and expect that such a feature will be reeled in immediately by Grok’s developers. However, I don’t expect that the production of such images in private, such as in the aforementioned ChatGPT, will disappear so easily. In fact there is zero reason to doubt that there have been people privately creating, and even sharing such images since AI visual manipulation reached its mature stage in the last few years. This, I think, is where there will be a much wider and longer-lasting impact on the way we use the internet.

How do we even work to prevent such private production? As I mentioned, people have been using AI in all sorts of unintended ways since the very beginning, any safeguards created by AI developers will be bypassed given enough time and effort. Even if the AI companies did formulate a perfect system of safeguarding their bots behaviour, the technology behind Artificial Intelligence is only getting better understood, more powerful, and less expensive. As computers become more powerful and more optimised for hosting AI, it likely won’t be long until consumer grade hardware will be able to run such software.

All it takes is one person to create an effective open-source project that allows consumer hardware to create these images and there’s no going back. Just as Oppenheimer couldn’t uninvent the nuclear bomb, nobody can uninvent AI image manipulation.

What options are we left with? Criminalisation? Again, how would this be enforced on a regular basis? While I think it’s right that these acts should be illegal, and people who are caught engaging in them should be prosecuted, it would be extremely difficult to catch all but the most flagrant offenders. Policing the internet for deepfaked pornography made in private would be just as difficult in the near future as it is today to police people gluing cut outs of people’s faces to pornography for gratification in their own homes, especially considering the technology is only getting better at producing more ‘realistic’ images that will be be even more difficult to distinguish from reality.

One solution occasionally touted is to ‘simply’ ban internet anonymity, by making it that all social media accounts are linked to a public individual. The problems with this are innumerable and could be an entire article in and of themselves. It feels like throwing the baby out with the bathwater to get rid of all the benefits that online anonymity confers, and I strongly doubt such an effort would even be particularly effective, as people would just go underground, as is already done for the online distribution of illegal drugs and pirated content. This simply isn’t a price worth paying for such a small return. It seems to me that most people who actively support solutions like this are people who simply want to abolish anonymity to spy on people first and foremost, and are merely using crises like this as an excuse to push their authoritarianism. To paraphrase Rahm Emanuel, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

Aside from deepfake pornography, there is also a similar issue with deepfakes being used to deceive people. Faked videos of celebrities and politicians doing or saying controversial things are becoming more and more prevalent. It is also becoming common for people to watch Artificial Intelligence ‘slop’ content without even realising that it’s AI. There have even been (companies defrauded of millions)[https://senseient.com/ride-the-lightning/cybercriminals-deepfake-company-directors-voice-in-35-million-bank-heist/] by scammers using deepfake technology. (In a recent study)[https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/10/12/most-people-cant-tell-the-difference-between-ai-and-human-voices-study-finds] people were asked to listen to samples of both real and artificial speech. It was found that artificial speech was mistaken for real speech 58% of the time. It won’t be long until content generated or edited by AI becomes accurate enough for it to be basically impossible to tell whether it’s fake or not. This leaves huge amounts of space for bad actors to deceive the masses for countless purposes, be it ‘innocent trolling,’ scamming, false accusations of crime, or even electoral tampering.

I think that all of this calls for a cultural shift of how we use the internet and computers in general. The virtual world we have been pinning our society to for the last 30 years is drifting further from the real world. The social media platforms on which we post our lives are losing their already light grips on reality. There is already something of a trend of people leaving social media behind and deleting their accounts. I think the fact that images posted can be so easily edited in such explicit ways could serve as an incentive for this trend to grow, and for our society as a whole to largely grow past social media. Social media as a news source could also be on its way out, human-generated misinformation and ‘slop’ are already issues as it is, the coming tsunami of their AI-generated equivalents could cause more people to return to traditional media and modern websites that emulate it for both news and entertainment.

All things considered, I personally doubt that we have seen the worst of Artificial Intelligence, which is why I think it’s imperative that we work to culturally ready ourselves from whatever comes next. Pandora’s box has been opened, the evils are flooding out, we must use the hope that lies at its bottom to save ourselves.