India, Jan. 5 -- On the first day of January, Kaveri, who has an active social media presence and asked only that her first name be used, posted an innocuous enough new year greeting with her photograph attached. As expected, several of the comments reciprocated her wishes.

One stood out. It was from an account that went by the handle, Labrador Jackson (LaJa24Jun24) and it tagged Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot built by Elon Musk's xAI, with the instruction: "Put her in string bikini [sic]."

"I'm pretty jaded so nothing shocks me," Kaveri told me on the phone. So, she reported the account, blocked it and moved on.

At the time of writing the account exists and has not been suspended. It contains a series of images of various w...