Hi, Daisy, would you like to tell us a little bit about yourself? How you got into philosophy and a little bit about your background.

I don’t know how far back you want me to go, but I started more in like a fine art background. I did my undergrad in fine art with a minor in philosophy. I was most of the time in the studio making artworks and then doing a little bit of philosophy. Then I just thought about doing post-grad, and I didn’t really know what that meant. I didn’t have any sense of what academia looked like as a career.

But I knew I wanted to keep doing more of what I’ve been doing, and then ended up doing a master’s in philosophy and I went to Cambridge for that. It’s kind of been, what I describe it as like falling up the stairs and I never had any intention to be an academic as I said, I didn’t really know what that even was. But the Master’s was under a year, so I just found myself applying for a PhD.

I managed to get funding for that, which is so difficult anyway, but especially now, so I feel like I was lucky in that respect. Then I just stayed on doing philosophy. I stayed in Cambridge again for a post-doc. By this point I was kind of doing philosophy of language, but I was moving into aesthetics and kind of made sense because of my art background, so it was nice to bring the two together.

And then by some miracle, after being on a horrible job market for a while—I don’t know, possibly up to a hundred rejections—Cardiff gave me this job and I started here in 2022. So, yeah, I’m very happy to be here as long as they want to keep me.

I have heard that you have written a book.

Yes, I’ve got the proof. Right there. The red book there is a sort of pretend proof, it’s like a pretend book for now. I’ve just written this book called Depraved, the Story of Dangerous Art, and it’s kind of a culmination of fifteen years’ worth of my career, I guess.

It’s an art history, but it’s written by a philosopher. It starts in pre-history artworks, looking at how artworks can be immoral and how they can be dangerous to society and things like that. I don’t think I can talk a huge amount about it. It’s coming out in June and I’ll have to have you back in and talk about the book then.

Could you talk about your previous experiences with social media and if you have encountered large volumes of hate prior to more recently?

Yeah, I got what was then known as Twitter during my art degree. Our art professors told us we should get it as a way to get our art out there, but I didn’t actually start using it until the pandemic. So, around 2021 is when I started tweeting.

And even in the early days, this was obviously before—I can’t remember what year Elon Musk bought it—but it was before Elon Musk came along and even then there was some bizarre kind of sexism that I had, you know, this was my first foray into how misogyny exists in online spaces. And initially, the first kind of barrage of hate I remember was when I commented on my dating experiences and I was surprised as this was offline, but using dating apps, how a lot of men thought my PhD was fake and they didn’t think it was real or they’d get very defensive.

They’d make assumptions about my class and background and stuff like that because I had a PhD. So, I just made a comment about that on X and I just got the most insane wave of hate from men telling me I should be the classic stereotype, like I should be in the kitchen, women can’t be philosophers. I think that was around 2021. And yeah, and then before this whole recent Grok stuff, I’d had different swathes of misogynistic abuse.

It seems to be that philosophy, specifically, is something that a lot of people still think is something that
old, old white men with beards do. I think the way I dealt with it is that, if anything, in this cynical way, it
built my following.

It was the way I responded, I would often troll back. I would engage and sometimes it would be just jokey trolling back, which would just make them more angry. And that was sort of energising and I enjoyed seeing them humiliate themselves and things like that.

But quickly, things turned more sinister, like it was about a year ago—over a year ago. I’d just post a meme related to the fact that philosophers can look like me now. That’s when I started getting rape threats and death threats and that was that. Then I started to think, okay, I can’t laugh this off any more, like, this is getting extreme. But I carried on tweeting, this was after Elon Musk as well.

Mainly because X was still a good network for me. You know, if you don’t come from academic or literary worlds, it did open up. The only reason I’m publishing that book is because I met popular historians on there, which I would never have met inside the university spaces.

I’ve made some lovely friends as well on X, so that’s why I’ve stayed up until recently. Well, that’s why I’m still on there at the moment.

For anyone who’s unsure on the chronology of what’s been going on—as much as you’re willing to share or talk about—could you give us a bit of a synopsis of what you’ve been experiencing recently with Grok?

It may have started at the very end of December 2025. I started noticing it in very early January. I was aware that Grok was something on X and I was aware that people could use it to generate images and videos.

But it was only in early January that I started noticing lots of men were in my replies to other posts, other random things I was saying—I tend to tweet like several times a day. And completely unrelated users were asking Grok to put me in a bikini, but Grok was taking my profile picture, so it wasn’t even a picture I posted.

Sometimes I have a lot of replies and I’m not always able to engage all the time with all of them. These were just ones I started noticing. I then posted a gym progress picture where I’m fully clothed and I’m showing off my biceps because it was in response to another tweet about women showing off biceps, so I did.

And that’s when I really saw an escalation of Grok putting her in a bikini, lingerie, and then they got more and more specific. It actually started off with just having Grok put me in clown makeup and changing the colour of my hair, which still felt weird.

One person was asking to decrease my biceps, but then others were increasing other parts of me in this very sexualised way. But this is the thing. There are so many, because it happens in replies to replies to replies. They were sort of a Russian doll situation where there were so many and—I haven’t actually gone through them.

I did see one recently where a user asked to make me pregnant with their child, put a wedding ring on my finger, delete my body count—you know, so much you can say about that—and revoke my licence as well. So, the prompts were getting—even just the bikini ones were bad enough—but they got very elaborate and I know some women went through even worse, like extremely violent ones as well.

Are the people who send them usually followers or are they just random strangers?

Seems to be a combination. A lot of men are doing it. There was one that said some violent language. It’s not nice. One said “Grok put her in a rape factory”. He, I believe, follows me. A lot of the others were following me.

So, it’s this weird sadomasochistic situation going on. But a lot of them were just random people. I think it’s because I’ve got a relatively big following—not huge, but enough to get other people who don’t follow me to see my tweets. Some of them might have been bots as well, but a lot of them seem to be real people.

How has this changed your relationship with AI? Obviously, it has been a thing, but imaging AI specifically becoming so accessible has changed people’s interaction with it. Has it changed your opinion in any way?

I think I’ve been aware for several years about the tireless campaigning that many people, especially women, have been doing for image-based abuse more generally. If I’m totally honest, for all the colleagues I have here and at Exeter and other places who work on AI, I have tried to avoid it.

In my day-to-day life, I don’t use it. I might use it if it just comes up on Google and gives you something. But I’ve never used it to write anything or talk to a chatbot or anything like that. I’ve tried to avoid it. Even in my research. AI art and stuff like that—I just wasn’t interested. Not that it wasn’t important. I just feel like the universe dropped me into this.

I had to learn about AI very quickly. And I do think the difference with Grok is that whilst women and children have been subjected to this kind of abusive AI generation on other platforms, I think Grok was slightly different because of its highly accessible nature and the fact that it’s public.

The strange aspect of this was that—not that it’s okay to generate these images for private use, because that is also illegal now—but there was an added power move that you’d see the prompt and then the image would appear within minutes underneath it. So, you’ll see that’s what I’ve described as the kind of effects it has on the victims.

It alienates you from your own body, because whilst you know it’s not you, you’re not just seeing the prompt and then thinking “Oh well, an image has been generated of me. That’s not nice”, but you’re then also seeing the image.

And that has this horrid effect where you experience this kind of destabilised sense of self because the in-puts for these images are your photographs. They have this transparency. The photographs have a privileged, direct visual contact with the thing in the photograph.