When the Grok chatbot was shown to be generating pornographic deepfakes of women and children without their consent or knowledge, tech juggernaut Elon Musk rushed to defend his machine and frame the scandal as a byproduct of users’ free will.
For me the scandal was personal. My own image was among the first to be manipulated. My clothes were digitally removed. My face was plastered into sexual situations I had no control over and no desire to be involved in. I remember looking at it and feeling exposed in a way that was difficult to explain to anyone who had not experienced it. It did not matter that the image was fake. The sense of violation was real.
I am a Catholic, and was raised with the belief that the body is inviolable and intrinsically linked to God’s divinity. Scripture is unambiguous on this point. “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?” St Paul asks. “You are not your own; you were bought with a price. Therefore, glorify God in your body” (1 Corinthians 6:15, 19 to 20). That belief sits uneasily in a culture that treats bodies as raw material for sexual entertainment, easily edited to fit the viewer’s gaze.
But what Grok exposed was not merely a technological failure. It showed how thoroughly the language of pornography has seeped into popular culture. AI systems learn from human behaviour. Their models are fed by our content. Their responses are entirely shaped by the society they serve. ChatGPT, OpenAI, and their brethren mirror what we reward, what we search for, and what we excuse.
Put simply, a machine trained on a porn saturated internet will inevitably reproduce the same logic. Desire without restraint. Intimacy without respect. Sex without love.
It is in these paradoxes that the danger for young Catholics becomes acute. Pornography is no longer a taboo. Multiple studies suggest the average age of first exposure is now between 11 and 13, with teenagers following the example of their favourite adult films rather than learning about healthy relationships through sex education. By adulthood, large majorities of men, and a growing proportion of women, report daily consumption. Surveys in the UK and the US consistently find that around one in five young men describe their porn use as compulsive, while rising rates of intimate partner violence and so called rough sex killings are being linked to extreme pornography and sexual sadism.
The Church’s binary attitude to pornography is sometimes mocked as outdated and ignorant of modern realities. But what is becoming increasingly obvious is that Rome has got it right. The Catechism does not merely condemn pornography. It names what it does. It “reduces persons to objects” and “does grave injury to the dignity of its participants”.
Those are not abstractions. Pastors, teachers, and parents see the consequences daily. Increased mental health issues. Sexual dysfunction. Distorted expectations of relationships. A quiet but pervasive shame that keeps many young people away from the sacraments.
There is little doubt that what we consume shapes our desires, and what we desire shapes the person we become. The influence of environment and media on early development is well documented. Christ’s own words in the Sermon on the Mount are bracing in this context.
“Everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). Deepfake pornography intensifies every negative cultural influence already present in modern society. It removes the last trace of reciprocity and teaches that sexual fulfilment is something we are owed and can take at will. There is no other person to consider. No possibility of mutual consent or moral responsibility. People become images to be consumed, generated, and discarded on demand.
For a young person still learning what love is for, this is profoundly deforming. It trains the imagination away from relationships and towards control, and the damage is not limited to those who consume it.
The vast majority of deepfake pornography targets women. In the case of Grok’s recent scandal, ordinary women had their images taken from social media by faceless users and were sexualised without consent. To see one’s likeness perverted in this way is akin to erasure. And while young Catholics like myself attempt to live chastely, our chronically online culture catechises us in precisely the opposite direction.
Yet the Christian vision of sexuality is not rooted in fear. It is rooted in hope. It insists that desire can be purified rather than indulged, healed rather than denied.
“Blessed are the pure in heart,” Christ says, “for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8). Purity here is not naïveté. It is clarity of vision. It is the ability to see others as they truly are, not as vessels for selfish desire, but as persons.
The Grok scandal will fade, and another platform will replicate its perversions even if content filters are tightened. But a line has been crossed, marking another watershed moment in the moral decline of twenty first century culture and forcing a question that can no longer be avoided. What kind of people are we forming, and what kind of relationships are we training them for?
If the Church is serious about defending human dignity, she must speak plainly about pornography and condemn it without equivocation. No algorithm can teach a young person how to love. That task still belongs to families, parishes, and a Church willing to stand against the evils of the modern internet.
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