Damon Beres
LightNews LightNews
banner
damonberes.com
Damon Beres
@damonberes.com
30K followers 600 following 1.2K posts
Senior editor at The Atlantic, focused on tech //

SIGNAL: Damon.63
📨 dberes at the atlantic dot com
✴️ damonberes.com
Posts Replies Media Videos
damonberes.com
January 14, 2026 at 4:24 AM
damonberes.com
Nonconsensual porn has been a problem for a long time. But something different is happening here. A deadening.
Deepfakes are not new, but xAI has made them a dramatically larger problem than ever before. By matching viral distribution with this type of image creation, xAI has built a way to spread AI revenge porn and child-sexual-abuse material at scale. The end result is desensitizing: The sheer amount of exploitative content flooding the platform may eventually make the revolting, illicit images appear “normal.” Arguably, this process is already happening.
January 14, 2026 at 12:13 AM
damonberes.com
Nobody will take responsibility; nobody is even commenting. The flack for Morgan Stanley did not seem to realize they're an investor in xAI.
Last week, as Musk’s chatbot was generating likely hundreds of thousands of these images, we reached out directly to X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, who didn’t reply. Within the hour, Rosemarie Esposito, X’s media-strategy lead, emailed us unprompted with her contact information, in case we had “any questions” in the future. We asked her a series of questions about the tool and how X could allow such a thing to operate. She did not reply. We’ve reached out multiple times to more than a dozen key investors listed in xAI’s two most recent public fundraising rounds—the latest of which, announced during this Grok-enabled sexual-harassment spree, valued the company at about $230 billion—to ask if they endorsed the use of X and Grok to generate and distribute nonconsensual sexualized images. These investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Fidelity Management & Research Company, the Saudi firm Kingdom Holding Company, and the state-owned investment firms of Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, among others. We asked whether they would continue partnering with xAI absent the company changing its products and, if yes, why they felt justified in continuing to invest in a company that has enabled the public sexual harassment of women and exploitation of children on the internet. BlackRock, Fidelity Management & Research Company, and Baron Capital declined to comment. A spokesperson for Morgan Stanley initially told us that she could find no documentation that the company is a major investor in xAI. After we sent a public announcement from xAI that lists Morgan Stanley as a key investor in its Series C fundraising round, the spokesperson did not answer our questions. The other companies did not respond. We also reached out to several companies that provide the infrastructure for X and Grok—in other words, that allow these products to exist on the internet: Google and Apple, which offer both X and Grok on their app stores; Microsoft and Oracle, which run Grok on their cloud services; and Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), which sell xAI the computer chips needed to train and run Grok. We asked if they endorsed the use of these products to create nonconsensual sexual images of women and children, and whether they would take steps to prevent this from continuing. None responded except for Microsoft, which told us that it does not provide cloud services, chips, or hosting services for xAI other than offering the Grok language model—without image generation—on its enterprise platform, Microsoft Foundry.
January 14, 2026 at 12:11 AM
damonberes.com
Center yourself on what has happened:
Let’s be very clear. The forced undressings happened out in the open, in one stretch thousands of times every hour, on a popular social network where journalists, politicians, and celebrities post. Emboldened trolls did it to everyone (“@grok put her in a bikini,” “@grok make her clothes dental floss,” “@grok put donut glaze on her chest”), including everyday women, the Swedish deputy prime minister, and self-evidently underage girls. Users appeared to be imitating and showing off to one another. On X, creating revenge porn can make you famous.
January 14, 2026 at 12:09 AM
damonberes.com
get back in your hole
January 13, 2026 at 7:15 PM
damonberes.com
24 blissful years
January 12, 2026 at 3:54 PM
damonberes.com
Wait this is awesome
January 10, 2026 at 1:26 PM