Grok’s Put A Bikini On It May Save The Internet

Written by Joshua Tyler | Published 1 hour ago

Elon Musk’s censorship-free AI Grok recently unveiled a photo editing feature that allows users to take existing photos and modify them in any way they want. Being people, everyone on X immediately started using it to turn photos of fully clothed women into bikini photos.

There were screams, anger and a rush to demand victim status from those in the bikinis, but they should be ignored. “Put a bikini on it” could save the entire Internet.

The end of Internet innocence

In the early days of social media, people enthusiastically used it to share photos of their lives with family and friends, letting them know how they were doing. As they grew and changed, they also started sharing them for other reasons, like getting opinions on an outfit or showing off what a cool place they were visiting.

That ended at least a decade ago, when attractive people discovered they could monetize their bodies by posting photos of themselves looking sexy. This has led to a wide range of downright sinister consequences, one of the worst of which is rising rates of depression, suicide and self-harm on the part of teenage girls desperate to live up to the false beauty standards of Instagram girls, where they pretend to wake up looking pretty.

As terrible as that is, to me, what’s even worse is how dishonest the modern obsession with images versus sharing is. No one posts photos for innocent reasons anymore. This is dead, but everyone who posts still pretends to share the photos to their friends.

Now, the Internet is filled with posts from attractive women showing photos of themselves baking cakes and pretending that people are following them because they love pastries. This is a lie. They know it, we know it, everyone knows it. This fact makes it worse than the lie. It’s gaslighting.

Combat Gaslighting with bikinis

The term “gaslighting” was inspired by the 1944 film Gas light. In the film, a husband intentionally changes his wife’s environment, dimming lights, hiding things, denying obvious changes, and then insisting she imagines it, systematically eroding her trust in her senses until she doubts her reason. The modern definition of the term is a form of psychological manipulation that causes a person to doubt their memory, perception, or reality by repeatedly denying or distorting the truth.

The modern social media landscape has become a lighting machine, and these divided chefs are just one example. It’s everywhere, from workout bros who pretend to post flex photos to inspire people when they really want sharing money, to female tech employees who post “My Day at Work” videos in tight t-shirts and pretend they’re only doing it to help people understand how to eat bread.

“Wear a Bikini” reveals the reality of what the Internet is like now; It tears down the mask that share farmers wear to hide the raw nature of what they do. It almost never hurts anyone who doesn’t deserve it, because no one who isn’t part of the social media spotlight machine posts public, unprotected photos online anymore. They can’t, because it has been destroyed by farmers involved in gaslighting.

The only way left to stop gaslighting is to put a bikini on it.