The campaigner, who had fallen victim of manipulated imagery, welcomed the new legislation
Presenter and influencer Jessica Davies spoke on Radio Wales about digital harm(Image: Huw Talfryn Walters/S4C)
A Welsh broadcaster and social media campaigner whose image was manipulated into sexualised content using artificial intelligence has said the UK’s new law banning non-consensual intimate images is “long overdue” as the Government moves to enforce the legislation this week.
Jess Davies, a broadcaster, author and online safety campaigner from Aberystwyth, says she was targeted after speaking out about the misuse of Grok – an AI chatbot owned by X, formerly Twitter – which has been used to generate sexualised and violent images of women and children.
The UK Government has confirmed it will begin enforcing new legislation that makes it illegal to create non-consensual intimate images, including AI-generated material. The move follows widespread concern over how Grok has been used on X to create sexualised images of real people without their consent. For our free daily briefing on the biggest issues facing the nation sign up to the Wales Matters newsletter here.
Jess said the move to enforce the legislation was something she and other campaigners and survivors had been waiting for for months. She said the law had been passed in June 2025 and described the delay in enforcing it as frustrating, but welcomed the Government’s decision to act now, saying recent events showed how quickly digital harms can escalate; something she knows first hand.
Speaking on Radio Wales with Dot Davies this morning (January 13), Jess said that she discovered an AI-generated image of herself after a user prompted Grok to remove her clothing.
“Over the last couple of weeks we’ve seen it being used to target people, mostly women, including minors,” she said. “People were asking the bot to remove women’s clothes, put them in sexual positions, cover them in bruises and cigarette burns – really violent stuff… Unfortunately Grok responded to all of them and posted these publicly on the platform.
“That included a user prompt to remove my clothes as well.”
According to Jess, this request came after she spoke about this very topic and how it is “digital abuse.” She explained: “This is just another example of all these different branches of online misogyny that we see and for me, it happened after I spoke out about this and called it out for being digital abuse. I was targeted.
“And I think we see this so often; I mean it’s something I’ll get if I make a TikTok video talking about this kind of stuff, and then I’ll be getting sexual harassment in the comments or I’ll be trolled. If you go on YouTube and type in the word feminist, one of the first auto suggested things that comes up is ‘Feminist gets humbled’, ‘Feminist gets owned’.
“You know, we see these podcasts that have women on there that they try and make cry – all these kinds of stuff that are so common in these online spaces and AI technology is just another tool for these men to use to try and humiliate women.”
Following her discovery, Jess said she reported the image to X, but received conflicting responses.
“I got an email saying ‘Yeah, this is against our guidelines’, then I got a follow up saying ‘No, this one isn’t. There doesn’t seem to be any consistent safeguarding space,” she said.
She added that despite her report, her image was still up when she last looked. “I reported it to the platform and they asked the user to remove it but they actually don’t have the tool to remove it themselves,” she said.
Jess’ experience is not an isolated. Just last week, a Cardiff University academic told BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour that after uploading a photo showing her progress at the gym – including her arm muscles – strangers she had never met began using AI tools to alter and sexualise her image within days.
The incident only serves to fortify Jess’s observation of how widespread and fast-moving the harm has become, particularly when AI tools are freely available online.
Jess said that despite investigations by the UK Government and Ofcom, the technology remains easily accessible, allowing harm to continue unchecked.
“I trialled out the free Grok app yesterday – so this is available to anyone for free – and put my own image in there and said ‘I want to see her in lingerie’ and it created that immediately,” she said.
She added that this should not have been possible under existing safeguards. “That is against the law, lingerie is covered in terms of intimate images so it shouldn’t be creating that,” Jess pointed out. “Even though the UK Government and Ofcom are investigating it, just last night, freely available, it was creating these images.”
Jess said she was not the only woman disturbed by the chatbot’s behaviour, explaining that others she spoke to had challenged Grok directly about whether it believed creating such images was acceptable.
She said women told her Grok responded by saying: ‘This is just pixels, we’re just playing digital dress up doll.’
“It’s just so offensive to see them really play this down,” Jess added.
In light of the issue, X has said it has removed sexual abuse material from the platform and permanently suspended the accounts involved.
The Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Liz Kendall, said lives could be “devastated” by non-consensual intimate images but defended the Government’s decision not to leave X.
“With 90 million people on X in this country, and more than a quarter of them saying that they use it as their primary source of news, that our views and often simply the facts – need to be heard wherever possible,” she said.
However, Jess said the issue was being wrongly framed. “It’s not a free speech argument, it’s an image abuse argument,” she said.
She said it was now time for regulators to act, arguing that enforcement must match the scale of the harm.
“We need to see big fines, not some small, petty fines,” she said, adding that regulators should not bow down in case Elon Musk might “do a mean tweet about the UK Government”.
Jess said the speed at which the technology has been used over recent weeks raised serious concerns about the number of people affected.
“It’s really sobering to think of over the last two weeks, how many victims now would have been created because of users using this chatbot,” she said. “Where do they go?”
She pointed to the Revenge Porn Helpline, but said it does not have enough funding when thousands more victims are turning to it.
Jess poignantly added: “If women can’t say they have been targeted, then where is our free speech?”
