Grok is undressing women and children. Don’t expect the US to take action |
Over the past year, Elon Musk has made a series of protocol changes to Grok, the proprietary AI chatbot of his company xAI, which runs prominently on his social media site X, formerly Twitter. Many of these changes have been geared to make the bot more amenable to producing pornography. In August, Grok launched an image generator, branded as Grok Imagine, which featured a service geared toward creating nude, suggestive or sexually explicit content, including computer-generated pornographic images of real women. The feature, which was quickly used to create naked images of celebrities such as Taylor Swift, also allowed users to create brief videos, complete with animations and sounds.
Musk also rolled out AI girlfriends on the platform: animated personas – including female characters with exaggerated breasts and hips – that interacted in sexually explicit ways with users. One of the characters, “Ani”, was an anime-style cartoon blonde with a series of skimpy outfits; the bot blew kisses and addressed users as “my love” while directing the chats toward sexual content.
Later last fall, an internal update to Grok pushed the bot towards darker and more extreme content. Though the sexualization of children was technically disallowed in the bot’s internal prompts, the bot’s instructions from xAI state that “‘teenage’ or ‘girl’ does not necessarily imply underage”. The instructions also emphasize that the bot should not observe any restrictions on the darkness or violence of sexual content, the Atlantic reported. Taken together, these updates allow the bot to create realistic images of real, living “teenagers” or “girls” – along with adult women or anybody else – for the sake of users’ sexual gratification.
Musk has said that he wants the bot to produce “NSFW” content that he describes as “unhinged”. Users have obliged. AI-generated........