You can't turn off the new X (Twitter) Edit Image feature

X just rolled out a Grok-powered feature – Edit Image – that’s causing absolute chaos among artists and privacy advocates. The platform now lets any user AI-edit any public image posted on X, with zero consent required from the original poster.

The tool works through a simple long-press on mobile or an “Edit” button on web. Users can generate AI modifications like new backgrounds, added elements, or complete remixes that get posted as replies. And it gets worse: there’s also a “Make video with Grok” button that lets people animate any photo into a short video clip.

There’s no way to opt out or disable the option for others to edit your images. Plus, you won’t even get notifications when someone edits your work. No protection for watermarks either.

Artists are understandably livid. X user pizza990 pointed out that this doesn’t just put artists at risk but “every Twitter user at risk” since anyone can use AI to edit images of real people, including family photos. We’re talking potential deepfakes of your kids, your wedding photos, anything you’ve ever posted publicly.

Just watch this video for an example on how it works:

Some creators are deleting old images entirely or switching to GIF format as a workaround, though even that’s not foolproof since people can still download GIFs and feed them into AI tools. It just takes more steps.

Artists are also flagging an especially concerning issue. The feature bypasses AI poisoning tools like Glaze and Nightshade, which artists use to protect their work from being scraped for AI training. Since Grok directly takes a single image rather than working from a dataset, these protective measures are basically useless.

Artist Jeff Treves thought he’d found a solution in X’s privacy settings, but it turns out those only opt you out of having your data used to train AI models. They do absolutely nothing to stop other users from remixing your images. His conclusion was bleak: “We’ll be abused by AI more and more going forward. This is a losing battle”.

Instead of addressing any of these concerns, Elon Musk promoted the feature. He reposted XFreeze’s video (embedded above) and told his followers to “Try Grok image edit and video edit”. The replies were a mix of people having fun with quick edits and artists begging for an opt-out option.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen artists threaten to leave a platform because of AI. Last year, many artists left Instagram because the platform’s documentation suggests that public posts might be used for AI training. We’re watching another platform prioritize AI experimentation over creator consent, and I’m not holding my breath for meaningful safeguards.

The video feature makes this whole situation even more volatile. Anyone can now take your still images and animate them into six-second clips with audio. This is just as bad as letting anyone edit the images you post on the platform.

X is the first mainstream social media platform to let users modify other people’s images into videos. That’s not exactly the kind of innovation artists were hoping for. Yes, we’re all aware that people could simply download and edit the images either way, but this addition means that X is actively encouraging folks to edit images without consent. That’s a big difference.

We’ll keep an eye out for any further developments and will update the article accordingly.