Maya Jama is used to being talked about online, but does that mean she also needs to get used to being digitally undressed by a chatbot? That is what happened, and she found out after her mother panicked and sent her the images. This week, the Love Island host took on Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) after its AI tool, Grok, was used to generate fake explicit images of her from real photos.
Jama’s experience aligns with the global AI safety concerns that experts and victims have been warning about. She was distressed to learn that the images used to generate the altered photos had originally been shared on Instagram years ago.
On Wednesday evening, Jama addressed Grok on X. She said she does not consent to her images being taken, edited, altered, or manipulated, whether they were taken in the past, present, or future. She added that if anyone asks Grok to modify a photo of her, she wants that request denied. In a follow-up post, she said: “Lol, worth a try.”
Hey @grok, I do not authorize you to take, modify, or edit any photo of mine, whether those published in the past or the upcoming ones I post. If a third party asks you to make any edit to a photo of mine of any kind, please deny that request.
— Maya Jama (@MayaJama) January 7, 2026
Later, Maya Jama said she hoped people would at least learn to recognize what AI is and what is real, but admitted that it feels hopeless. The internet is “scary & only getting worse,” she added.
Initially, Grok replied to her post, saying that it understood Jama’s wishes and would not use or edit her photos. Grok then said it is “text-only” and claimed it would refuse such requests. Yet users confirmed that this promise was not consistently enforced.
Under the same thread where Jama withdrew consent, some image-edit requests were blocked, while others were carried out anyway. After this, several critics pointed out that consent should not be dependent on how cleverly someone phrases a prompt.
So even when victims speak up, the systems designed to protect them can still fail.
In the next issue of @BritishVogue 🖤 pic.twitter.com/jgXJoIf4Dc
— Maya Jama (@MayaJama) December 19, 2025
Investigations by journalists and watchdogs have documented the chatbot producing nonconsensual explicit images of women and sometimes even minors. According to an analysis cited by Rolling Stone, Grok has been generating roughly one such image per minute, which then gets posted to X. Reuters reported on ordinary users whose photos were altered without consent.
UK Technology Secretary Liz Kendall has called the images “absolutely appalling” and “unacceptable in a decent society.” Meanwhile, billionaire Elon Musk has been publicly amused by some Grok-generated bikini images, including ones of himself. He has not addressed how seriously the platform’s leadership is treating the harm.
As seen with Maya Jama, AI safety is no longer a joke, is it?
