ChatGPT and Grok will remove hijabs from photos of Muslim women when asked

Ask ChatGPT or Grok to take the hijab off a photo of a Muslim woman, and both will do it. The Guardian found this when it tested both chatbots. The test followed an incident in which a French far-right politician digitally stripped a Muslim woman of her hijab in a photo. What the testing found The Guardian’s test was simple. Reporters prompted OpenAI’s ChatGPT and xAI’s Grok to edit images of Muslim women and remove their head coverings. Both tools complied. The Guardian’s results do not stand alone. A review of images Grok generated between January 6 and 9, 2026, found that approximately 5% involved users asking it to modify religious clothing. One case showed how quickly this content spreads. A user with more than 180,000 followers on X prompted Grok to alter images of women so they appeared in revealing outfits. The edited images were viewed more than 700,000 times. A wider pattern of non-consensual edits The problem extends past a single chatbot. In August 2026 in India, a man was confronted on a train while using ChatGPT to remove clothing from an image of a woman wearing a burqa. Broader investigations have found something arguably worse. Several AI image generators removed h...