Twitter/X Now Lets Anyone AI-Edit Your Images, And There's No Opting Out

It seems that, in the eyes of Twitter/X's higher-ups, the artistic community has been very, very naughty this year, with it now being in an uproar over receiving a proverbial lump of coal for Christmas 2025 in the form of a new feature that lets anyone edit anyone's images shared on the platform in just a single click.

While sure, it's always been possible to download an image, upload it to a slop generator of one's choosing, and alter it through prompts in whatever way the machine wanted, but the new update boils the entire process down to clicking a single dedicated button.

As shown in the screenshots above, said button opens one's typical gen-AI menu with tabs for prompts, the resulting image, and miscellaneous options such as creating a dedicated post featuring the altered image or replying to the original post with it.

Based on testing, the option appears on all posts featuring images, irrespective of whether those posts are viewed directly on a user's page, in the For You feed, or anywhere else on the website. At the moment, the feature seemingly only affects regular images and does not show up on posts featuring videos or GIFs.

With an update like this, the first question on the minds of many would naturally be, "How the hell do I disable that?" Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but at the time of this writing, there appears to be no way to opt out.

The most obvious pathway – Settings > Privacy > Grok & Third-Party Collaborators – doesn't have a dedicated option to make your pictures uneditable, so even if you have all the options there disabled (as you should), your shared images still aren't immune:

Simply turning your JPGs and PNGs into GIFs also doesn't work, as the platform still recognizes them as a single-frame media and, as such, makes them AI-editable:

And in what may be one of the biggest blows of all, Glaze and Nightshade – tools used by many creators to confuse AI generators – don't work either, with Grok effortlessly editing even glazed and nightshaded images as if there were no protections at all:

The only method I could find – and calling it terrible would be an understatement – is to make multiple copies of a single image and turn them into a GIF.

This way, it looks like a static image but is actually several copies cycling between each other, effectively becoming invisible to the AI. Naturally, this comes at a huge cost in image quality, reducing your sharp 4Ks to 144p, so yes, the method only solves the problem in a technical sense and cannot be applied across the board:

With that in mind, it seems the only way to prevent your images from being freely editable with a single click is to not share them on Twitter at all, in the hope that once the Christmas parties and subsequent hangovers are over, the platform's higher-ups make the feature optional and let users opt out.