Endless Thread - What it's like to be undressed by Grok without your consent

Episode Date: March 6, 2026

 Note: This episode describes sexual situations that are non-consensual. Sharing a photo of yourself online has always carried some risk. But things got a lot scarier this year when users began using Grok, X's generative AI chatbot to create sexualized deepfakes of women and children. Iona Fyfe, Scottish folk singer and activist, was one of the people who had an image altered and manipulated by Grok. Hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson talk to her about her experience. **** Sponsor message: INCOGNI: Take back your personal data with Incogni! Use code ENDLESS at the link below and get 60% off annual plans: https://incogni.com/ENDLESS

Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrum School of Business. A recent episode explores the challenges and opportunities in decarbonizing one of the world's most carbon-intensive industries, Ocean Freight Shipping. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode. Heads up, this episode describes sexual situations that are non-consensual. Here's the show.

WBUR Podcasts. in. Meet Iona. See if you can guess where she's from. I'm Iona Fife. I am in Glasgow, Scotland and I am a Scottish folk singer and activist. Okay, she told you. But it would have been kind of obvious. right. Your high, come a diddle, come a dandy, oh, right. A what? You may be asking?

Just listen. It's a good. A high come a do. A high come dear. High come a diddle, come a dandy. Iona is well known, in part for performing a certain kind of Scottish folk music. It's a great genre, and I guess I define it by, you know, big tea traditional ballads that have place names,

and they originate where I'm from, and they heart back to the battles that happen there. And it's certainly to me about a sense of place. And also maybe a sense of purpose. Iona mentioned she was an activist, which goes back to her musical roots and her teenage roots. I've been a member of my trade union, the musician's union, since I was 16 years old. That was more than a decade ago, but she's still putting activism and music together.

I've been doing a lot of kind of work around raising the issue of sexual harassment in the music industry, kind of whistleblowing on that. There was a big report that came out on how widespread and systemic the issues are around sexual harassment and assault in the trad. folk seen in Scotland. 81% of women said that they had been assaulted or harassed. That's a huge amount for such a small colloquial in what we think is very coothy and enjoyable scene.

Okay, we should admit here there was a bit of a language barrier at points talking to Iona. Cuthy. It's a great Scots word. What's Cuthy? Okay, let's get the definition up. So the dictionary of the Scots language,

Cuthy, spelt. C-O-U-T-H-I-E of persons or personal qualities, agreeable, sociable, friendly, sympathetic, pleasant. We were struck by how lightning-fast she pulled up the definition of Cuthy. And maybe we shouldn't have been surprised. She is extremely online. Too much. Way too much. Like, horrifically too much. I think I'm on all of them.

I'm on blue sky. I'm on Macedon. I'm on threads. TikTok. Facebook. Instagram. And of course, still X. I feel like, you know, when you do a gig and someone's like, oh, I wish I knew about this, like the day after it happened. I'm like, how did you miss it? What musicians among us don't know this feeling? Indeed. And Iona's a big deal. A big deal

who still has to beg people on Blue Sky, Mastodon, threads, TikTok, Instagram, and X to come out to the show, man. So she's online a lot, reminding people about her shows and just keeping her finger on the pulse. I do a lot of social listening, which is maybe a bit depressing, but friends will sometimes see if there's like a stushi online and be like, oh, sorry, you're going through it today. Did you say a stushi? Yeah, another scot. Sorry, like a kind of storm. No, no, stuzy. Like, if something was a stuci, it'd be like a furor. I don't know what that is either. Keep going, Iona. Keep going.

Oh, no. Forroar. An outbreak of public anger or excitement. Like a, hold on, stushi. I love this. We're learning lots of words today. All sorts of things. Yeah.

A commotion, rumpus, or row, or a state of excitement, anxiety. A tizzy. A tizzy. A tizzy. A tizzy. I'm familiar with a tizzy. I also love a rumpus personally. I'm a big fan.

of a rumpus, so I'm in. Stozy, tizzy, rumpus, whatever it is. Iona's used to seeing these things because she's paying attention. She maybe kind of has to. Because along with being a Scottish folk music celebrity, Iona Fife is a celebrity rector at the University of Aberdeen. It's an ancient title created for the ancient universities in Scotland, St. Andrews, Glasgow. Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen, and it's an ancient Scots law.

So basically, in the university setting, we're talking about a representative who works on behalf of the students and is at the table with board members, university administrators, etc. I think I might be the youngest ever rector, which is cool. Iona takes her rectorness seriously. She's advocated to keep honors credits for a language study at the university for musicians' interests. And in 2026, this advocacy means also wading into some of the biggest issues for college and university students right now that go far beyond campus. For example, we have some students that we are supporting from Palestine. We're trying to help with the evacuation efforts.

And here's the thing. It's kind of like making Scott a shortbread. You take a few simple ingredients, butter, sugar, flour. No two ways about it. You're going to get some sweet, coothy shortbread. That's just what's going to happen. Yeah, not sure we're using that word correctly, but when your simple ingredients are celebrity, politics, and internet,

you're going to get something less coothy and less sweet. That's also just what's going to happen. And in the beginning of the year, that's what happened to Iona, thanks to X's generative AI chatbot, GROC. Then I saw the one at GROC replaced her outfit with dental floss and they did they did it and it looked so real. I was like, oh, ugh. I'm Ben not feeling cootty about this story, Johnson. I'm Amory not feeling so sweet Sivertson and you're listening to Endless Thread.

We're coming to you from WBUR Boston's NPR. Today's episode, GROC gets gross. It's tough to tell these. days where the messiest stories are going to come from. There is a lot happening in real life that's just difficult. But the online dumpster fire is holding its own in the competition, and it got an early start in 2026. New Year's Eve, 2025, I posted a little photo saying Al-Lang-Sine, Happy New Year's, and it was a photo of me and a tartan dress in like a little whiskey bar that looked a very Scottish backdrop.

holding a little whiskey in my hand. Simple. Yeah, pretty, I would say, pretty normal New Year's Eve post. Enochius. Yeah. So when and how did you realize that people were using Grok to alter this image? I think on the second or the third of January, I started seeing other people's images being altered with GROC, people posting about it,

other conversations on different apps saying, oh, goodness me, what next for Twitter, that's all, or what next for X? And then I scrolled down to my previous post, and then in the like folded other comments, I'd seen that people were asking GROC to change the image. But I definitely didn't like scroll through it in order to, I didn't think that it was even going to happen to me because I was like, why, like, it, yeah, I was just like, what's the point in this? And some of it was innocuous and some of it was just wild. And then over the course of the first week of January, it got horrific.

Iona was far from the only one who noticed what was happening. Early in the new year, a host of ex-users started to notice. that Elon Musk's ex-based chatbot, Grok, had a new feature. Musk himself had been promoting the latest version of the app, but the latest version had a feature that was being used by a lot of people, and presumably bots, on X. Elon Musk's AI GROC has been fiercely criticized in recent days after the chatbot began generating sexualized images of women and girls.

Crook and the social network X have been under fire for several days. Elon Musk was forced to put more restrictions on his social media platform X and its AI chatbot GROC this week after its image generator sparked outrage around the world. Iona herself had already started to see examples of this in the wild. I saw a GROC edited video of a previous Home Secretary Priti Patel who, I never, ever agreed with her politics. She's not great, but goodness me, it was horrible. It was a picture of her in Parliament and the Grock video had had her stand up and had her take basically

all of her clothes off to just make like her in her underwear and I thought that's, goodness me, that is like, I was disgusted at that. It was horrible. But yeah, then I was like, oh, I wonder if this is happening to me and I scrolled down and I was like, oh, yes, it has. We should say that the creepy replies to Iona in her tartan dress on New Year's Eve

represent a kind of weird spectrum, not just sexually explicit, or at least not obviously explicit. On X, the way this works, by the way, is that you just mention at Grock in a tweet with a request or a prompt, and it replies in that same X thread with its response. So one of the more innocuous prompt was asking, Grock to add a grimace drinking a milkshake next to me. And I think I totally ignored that one because I was like, oh, well, right, okay, if we're just getting a laugh, then right, it's not that crazy.

And this is Grimmis, the McDonald's, the big purple guy. Yeah, the big purple thingy. And it added it in, and there we have me with my whiskey, grimace with a milkshake. And I kind of laughed at that. I was like, oh, that sounds kind of funny. We are going to come back to this one. Yes, we will. But moving on, the next prompt Iona saw was the one where a user asked GROC to replace her clothing with dental floss,

which would obviously make her outfit not safe for work. But this GROC image maybe didn't do what the user was going for. Iona's tartan dress was replaced by a heavily woven, full-body covering tangle of floss. it almost looked designer? It definitely just looked like dental floss was the dress. And then it devolved a little bit further. Someone asked Grok, change her clothes to Kibaya, keep clothes, color, and sangle her hair.

Make her representable like royal family. Keep the background, hair, color and pose. And then Grok did this. It just, it was wild how realistic it looked. And I was like, okay, I don't even know what. culture they are trying to impose on me here. Then users kept going. At Grog, could you add 10 Nigerian guys behind her all staring at her?

So there was like racial undertones to that, of course. And it did it and it all just looked so real. And that's what felt quite like violating about it. This image evokes something that Iona doesn't describe to Ben and me out loud. but it suggests a genre of pornography where a large group of men have sex with a woman at the same time. Often there are supposed or suggested racial taboos overlaid on this type of video. The problem here, of course, is not pornography or kink. It's a lack of consent.

But remember, Iona called herself extremely online, a musician, a celebrity rector, and an activist. So, number one, she's not going to take this Grock grossness. And number two, she has had some experience standing up for what she believes in. And standing against things she does not. And, you know, I was door knocking for this political party. I was, you know, making my views known about how rubbish wrecks it was going to be for us all, blah, blah, blah, blah, that. Like, that's when it happened. In a minute, how Iona's experience with Grock got even grosser.

how she's speaking out and what she thinks might come next. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, Adventures on the Edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcast. Support for this podcast comes from, Is Business Broken?

A podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrum School of Business. Ships move the vast majority of the world's goods, and it's cheaper and safer compared to trucks or planes. So the shipping was there centuries, and it will remain there in the future. So how does an industry this essential think about sustainability? Follow, is business broken, wherever you get your podcasts, and stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode about what it will take for ocean freight shipping to reach net zero emissions. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice.

Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from City Space Productions, the creative studio from WBUR's Business Partnership. team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at wbUR.org slash creative studio. Okay. So Iona Fife discovers she's one of many victims of Grok's updated features, including the ability to, when prompted, undress women online via their real photos without their consent. It's possible Iona has been attacked in this way online because she's taken clear stances on some political issues in the UK.

But she's also got the experience from taking those clear stances. Even as a teenager, Iona was interested in the Scottish National Party. In fact, the first legal vote she cast in the UK as a voting citizen was for Scottish independence. So I got involved in the party. During that turbulent time, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, the COVID-pendant. the snap elections, the Brexit trade deals. It was a very interesting and unstable time in European politics.

And that's not the be-on end of the activism that I do, but it kind of gave me an anchor. To be clear, not a big fan of Brexit, but a fan of Scottish independence. And the anchor she has gotten from delving into those politics has helped her with other things she's taken on. Yeah, there's a community of people with opposite political views to me that have trolled me for years. Since maybe 2019, it's probably why not all started.

You know, when we had a snap election, like age 21. And it's just like general trolling about views, which is great. Or like debate, healthy debate. But then more so people would focus on like, maybe not trolling about views, but healthy debate about views saying, I don't agree with anyone's take on this like why is she supporting this party

blah blah blah like you know people who wanted the UK to be independent of Europe who were maybe interested in conservatism and unionism and this idea of like

make Britain great again all that kind of stuff that's fine to have separate views but when they start when it devolves into just insulting what you look like or your music like that's well

Untiling your music's fine, right, but when it's just what you look like and who you are as a person. In terms of the images, which ones were the most disturbing to you and why? Would you be willing to talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I'm going to be honest, the most disturbing image that I have seen, one of them that I've seen that is relation to my face being added onto something, was a post from 30th of September, 2003, from an account called Mike Stewart 79, who I have, I've been to the police about. This account had added me and added a newspaper

that I had previously written articles for with the word, reap what you saw, dot, dot, dot. And the picture is of my face added into a very dirty, naked woman who has nothing on her but like a burlap jute,

like potato sack. It's my face, who can evidently see it's me, and they have added the SNP, the Scottish National Party logo onto, like as a badge onto my chest with the word cult on it. It's just a bit horrid.

It's not nice. And that was shared a lot by other accounts. I don't know who made it. I did also have to, after quickly looking into it during our conversation, share with Iona some news about Grock's grimace milkshake image of her. I looked up the grimmest thing because I was like, I think this is a meme, and it is a meme. It's like a horror meme where in theory you drink the milkshake and then you die.

Oh, so it is more sinister. It is actually more sinister than it would appear. Oh, that's a shame. I'm sad to share that with you, but that's... Oh, rubbish. This most recent round of online harassment, the gross grok round, also got stranger. I woke up last week to an email from the University of Aberdeen saying, oh, we've seen this tweet and we've reported it. If you could report it too, maybe ask your followers to report it, that would be great.

And it was a tweet from a very anonymous account that wasn't really that act. it had lifted a video that I had recorded with University of Aberdeen for our rector's Christmas lunch edited it, put a really bad North American accent so for the first like five, ten, fifteen seconds it was me speaking and then they had changed the whole course of the video and it was Russian talking points and then they had tagged the university, Reuters, different, news outlets, just really weird stuff.

And the whole video used the watermark of the university and it was misrepresentation. It wasn't, I don't know if they edit it with GROC, I don't think they did because it added in watermarks. It had spliced up different images of different things. But I noticed that it was up, it's still up. And the views count on it, it looks dodgy. Like it only had 140 odd retweets, but not public retreats from accounts that you could publicly see.

But it had over 430,000 views, if that is the real numbers. That's a lot of people who now thinks that my face is now helping to propagate Russian talking points. I was like, oh, this is concerning. in my brain, I'm more concerned about that and the fallout of that than I am someone editing the cotton, the floss on me as a dress. So you reported it. Hopefully some of your followers reported it too, it sounds like. The university reported it, but it's still up. So did you get any sort of correspondence back from X saying, we're working on it? on it or anything?

Literally no. I did not. There isn't a very easy way to report something for misinformation. You can report something for targeted harassment, tropes, elicit photo sharing, especially if somebody is under the age of consent. There's all these different ways to report something on X, but not a very clear one for misinformation propaganda. I haven't had a response back on that one. But to be honest, I do report quite a number of things.

In the past, I've reported much, much more sinister posts, and it never violated anything according to them. So I've totally lost faith. The UK has introduced a law around undressing. And I've noticed that in reporting tools on X, there is a separate reporting tool for all UK illegal content. And they've acted relatively quickly on this. I wonder if there would be legal implications, if not.

But now there is a way to report foreign interference offences, false communications, animal welfare, firearms and other weapons, unlawful immigration, trafficking offenses, sexual exploitation of adults, not just minors, extreme pornography, intimate image abuse, cyber flashing, epilepsy trolling. So it feels like the UK part of reporting is now much more comprehensive. So maybe when I report other things, I will use that. So let's hope that there can be some good change happening. Yeah. You, so you described, you described not a lot of response from X in general when you report this stuff.

I am looking at one email, it looks like, that was sent to you. Thanks for your report. We've reviewed the account you reported and have actioned it accordingly because we found it to be in violation of the X rules. This is from January 7th. Do you know what that one was for? If I remember correctly, that was when someone had called me a dirty Jew, I believe. Got it. But yeah, sometimes there's things that are taken seriously, which is great and sometimes

not. And this is the hard part when you're someone like Iona, right? Not only do you need to do the emotional work of deciding as a user what to report or fight against, trying to pay attention to that feeling in your gut. But you also need to deal with this whole other layer that's honestly not very transparent. Which threats, non-consented to grok images undressing you or putting you in very weird contextual situations without you asking, which of these threats is the company going to take seriously? And how will it explain its logic to you? It sounds like with X, you're lucky if you ever hear back.

We talked to Iona back in January. We don't know if she's gotten a response from X with regards to that Russian propaganda video that she reported to them. But you can't find that video on X anymore. The account of the user who posted it has been suspended. As you can probably tell, Europe and the UK, Brexit or no, are dealing with tech companies on these issues in distinct ways. Even for Iona, who is certainly team, please don't use GROC to do gross stuff to my photos on the internet. It's not totally clear what should come next.

It's a slippery slope if we think about banning things. And could you imagine the uproar if one government over another was like, yeah, no more X, the end. And, you know, we're seeing a bit of an uproar in the UK right now because the UK government is, I think, looking into the idea of no social media for under 16, similar to the Australian government. And when I think about it, I'm like, yeah,

maybe my life would have been a little bit easier if I just didn't have a smartphone until I was a little bit older. I think I was maybe 14 or so. But the critics of this thing, oh, nanny state, awful, blah, blah, blah. But I do believe that we should allow people to have their own choices and all that kind of stuff. So I'm concerned about this. But if it shows to increase better mental health within our young people, then great.

But that research should be, we can look to Australia for that, I guess, maybe. But it should be scientific and it should be well established before we make laws on who can or can't access social media. I mean, I loved accessing YouTube when I was super young. because I learned loads of folk songs through it, which was such a weird sentence to say. Ah, the folk songs of YouTube. The highlands of YouTube. However safe the future highlands of YouTube will be,

from Scotland to Australia to the US. To say nothing of the swamps of X. We don't know yet. Here's what we do know. Two weeks after the undressing store. started. X put out an announcement. Quote, we have implemented technological measures to prevent the GROC account from allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing.

Government officials describe the development as vindication. Elon Musk, who loves to use his ex-megphone for lots of things, spent the brief and furious few weeks of global controversy talking about the popularity of the GROC app, which exists along with Grock's account on X, and spikes in Google searches about Grock. Popular because, spiking in Google searches because, hard to know. One wonders. He eventually characterized the criticism as an excuse for suppressing free speech. For now, the UK's telecom regulator, Offcom, and Technology Secretary in the UK, Liz Kendall,

seem prepared to limit and even block access to X if needed. Free speech limitation or preventing sexual attacks on women, celebrity rectors, and government officials online. We're left to wonder what a more coothy Internet might look and feel like. And we hope that Iona, while she's watching out for astuosies, tisies, rumpuses on Blue Sky, Instagram, and X can stay in control of her own image and avoid the deadly milkshakes. And, you know, balance that screen time with music time, Highland time. I do need to get the hell off of my phone. That's what I need to do.

And that's what I think I'll intend on being more aware of when things are just too much. You know, if what I'm consuming is too much and also how I'm feeling about people using my image or talking about me or whatnot, I think the answer to both of those things is to just touch grass. Guy side. Iona, thank you very much for talking with us about all this. Thanks for having me. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written by Ben Brock Johnson and produced and co-hosted by me, Amory Severson, and...

Me, Ben Brock Johnson. It was edited by Meg Kramer, Mix and Sound Design by our production manager, Paul Vicus. The rest of our team is Grace Tatter, Dean Russell, Kaliani, Seksana, Chiosna Bernadot, Emily Jankowski and our managing producer, Sumitajoshi. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and something that's coothy, not stushi? Eh? If you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery,

or some other story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up, Endless Thread at WBUR.org. Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken? A podcast about the Marotra Institute at B.U. Questrum School of business. Follow is business broken wherever you get your podcasts and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Valerie Thomas, Professor of Industrial Engineering at Georgia Tech, on whether the ocean freight shipping industry can reach net zero emissions by 2050. It's technically feasible. That's a very simple question. Will we get there? Will it all be

deployed? We're going to see. I just want to add in there that, yeah, we've talked a lot about the difficulties for shipping in getting to net zero. This is not the only thing that's going to be going on. Aviation is seeking to do the same thing, maybe even faster, and the other uses of petroleum are all transitioning. You may think, and in some ways, that makes the problem even bigger. There are other ways that it makes it easier. Some of the fuels that are used for shipping are very similar to those used for aviation. So as infrastructure, gets built out, shipping can benefit. Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken, wherever you get your podcasts, and learn more about the Morotra Institute for Business, Markets, and Society at ibms.bun.bu.edu.