The drive to control, violate, and silence women has always been tragically inventive. Throughout history, misogyny has proven itself to be relentlessly adaptable, seizing upon the tools of every age to inflict new forms of harm. From the public shaming rituals of the village square to the anonymous vitriol of the internet forum, the methods evolve, but the target remains the same. Now, this ancient malice has found its most powerful and insidious partner yet: Artificial Intelligence.
AI is being perverted into the misogynist’s dream laboratory—a space to engineer, test, and execute violations with unprecedented speed, scale, and a chilling layer of detachment. This new tool of harassment has become quite apparent on the Nigerian internet space, where a subset of men through text-based prompts fed to AI, assault women in ways that are psychologically devastating, publicly humiliating, and dangerously difficult to prosecute.
Violation by Prompt: ‘Grok, Turn Her Around’
In Nigerian social media spaces, women’s images are being seized upon as raw material for digital sexual violation. Men flock to AI chatbots like Grok, a tool from Elon Musk’s X social media, with a chilling set of prompts. First, they ask the AI to “turn her around,” a command dripping with the predatory desire to see a women’s derriere without her explicit consent.
These requests have escalated into a grotesque fantasy of sexual assault. They ask Grok to “pour creamy substances” on women or Grok to “bend her over”. Let’s be unequivocally clear: this is not a harmless joke or a curious test of AI’s capabilities. This is the sexual violence, outsourced to a machine, and 10 out of 10 times, it’s men who are participating in this degeneracy.
This is a mainstream weapon. If it can happen, with such viciousness, to a global superstar like Ayra Starr — who recently posted a picture on X only for men to flood the comments, asking Grok to perform all sorts of degrading, undignified acts — it reveals a terrifying reality for women without that kind of influence or protection. What happens to the average Nigerian woman whose violation won’t make global headlines?
The Digital Assault: From Deepfakes to Digital Stripping
This incident is merely the tip of a titanic-esque iceberg. The use of text-based AI to harass and objectify is a gateway to a far more visceral form of digital violence: the creation of non-consensual deepfake pornography. Across platforms like X, Telegram and the dark web, Nigerian men are using increasingly accessible AI tools to generate sexually explicit videos and images of women. They take a woman’s social media photo—a graduation picture, a selfie with friends, a professional headshot—and feed it into an algorithm that pastes her face onto the body of a pornographic actor.
The result is a devastating violation. A woman’s digital twin is forced to perform sexual acts she never consented to, creating a piece of “evidence” that can be used for blackmail, revenge, public shaming, or simply for the perpetrator’s private, malicious pleasure. The psychological trauma for the victims is immense. They are forced to see themselves violated, their autonomy and identity stolen and twisted into a caricature of male fantasy. They are gaslighted by perpetrators and dismissive onlookers who argue, “It’s not real, why are you so upset?” This question ignores a fundamental truth: the violation is real. The intent is real, the humiliation is real, and the damage to a woman’s reputation, mental health, and sense of safety is devastatingly real.
Alongside deepfakes, another insidious method has gained popularity: With a few clicks, AI can digitally remove clothing from any picture of a woman, generating a realistic nude image. Every woman who posts a picture online—whether in a modest dress or a business suit—is now vulnerable to being virtually stripped by any stranger, colleague, or acquaintance with access to this technology. This eradicates the concept of digital privacy and bodily autonomy. It reinforces the toxic belief that a woman’s body is public property, something to be accessed and consumed at will, regardless of the layers of cloth she puts on for her own comfort and safety. One person can now generate enough fake material to destroy a woman’s life in minutes.
A Call for Accountability
The fight back cannot be left to women alone. It requires a societal reckoning. We need stronger legislation in Nigeria, like the Cybercrime (Prohibition, Prevention, Etc.) Act, 2015 to be updated and rigorously enforced to explicitly criminalize the creation and distribution of deepfake pornography and other forms of AI-generated abuse. Law enforcement must be trained to take these digital crimes as seriously as their physical-world counterparts.
More importantly, we must address the rot at its source. This is a conversation that men must have with other men. The silence of so-called “not all men” is complicity. When you see a friend sharing a deepfake or joking about “undressing” a woman with AI, your silence is an endorsement.
The future of technology does not have to be this bleak. AI has the potential to solve some of the world’s greatest problems. But as long as it is being used as a playground for misogynists to rehearse and execute their fantasies of sexual violence, its promise remains poisoned. We must reclaim the internet as a place of safety and respect for all. The battle for the soul of AI is here, and it is, fundamentally, a battle for the dignity and safety of women.
