heyOver the past year, Elon Musk has made several protocol changes to Grok, an AI chatbot owned by his company xAI, which runs prominently on his social media site Many of these changes are designed to make bots more capable of producing pornography. In August, Grok launched an image generator, branded as Grok Imagine, which included a service for creating nude, suggestive or sexually explicit content, including computer-generated pornographic images of real women. The feature, which was used to create nude images of celebrities such as Taylor Swift, also allowed users to create short videos with animations and sounds.
Musk also introduced AI Girlfriends to the platform: animated personas – consisting of female characters with exaggerated breasts and hips – that interact with users in a sexually explicit manner. One of the characters, “Ani”, was an anime-style cartoon blonde who had a series of short outfits; The bot directed chats toward sexual content, blowing users kisses and addressing them as “my love.”
Later last fall, an internal update for Grok Pushed bots towards darker and more extreme contentAlthough the bot’s internal prompts technically disapproved of the sexual exploitation of children, XAI’s bot’s instructions stated that “‘teenage’ or ‘girl’ does not necessarily mean underage”, The instructions also emphasize that the bot should not impose any restrictions on darkness or violence of sexual content, The Atlantic reportedOverall, these updates allow the bot to create realistic images of adult women or anyone else, as well as real, live “teens” or “girls” for users’ sexual satisfaction,
Musk has said that he wants the bot to produce “NSFW” content which he describes as “unmoving“. Users obliged. AI-generated images of real women were instantly generated collectively by users. Men and others could use the product to harass women they knew – to take revenge on old girlfriends, to humiliate co-workers, classmates, family members and acquaintances, and to express dominance or contempt for strangers, Internet personalities, celebrities, and ordinary users. Become “@Grok put her in a bikini” or “@Grok took her clothes off” or “@Grok spread her legs”. regular reactions Any images women post of themselves – or that are posted by others – on the platform. Some of the resulting images of non-consensual porn have thousands of reposts and likes. The risk and reality of being subjected to AI-generated porn, without consent – and those images going viral on large social-media platforms where the generator was embedded – quickly became a new tax on women’s presence online and in the public sphere, a tax that women must pay with their dignity intact. The interventions of Musk and his companies have had a profound impact on women’s civil rights, limiting their access to the public sphere, making the public sphere largely hostile and abusive towards women.
X removed many of these images, but many remain online, and some users appear to have been suspended for creating them. Until this week, the bot had not been effectively replaced stop this type of abuseAs if in parody of the allergy felt by the tech industry – and by Musk in particular – to all forms of responsibility or moral seriousness, these sexist and abuse-facilitating features on X’s AI products are marked with a charmingly childish name: “Spicy Mode”,
Now, Musk and Female users reported that their childhood photos were transformed into near-nude images by bots at the request of users. Some X accounts asked the bot to remove clothing from images of the then-12-year-old actor, who had recently appeared on Stranger Things.
An account associated with the Grok bot released a statement saying: “We have identified vulnerabilities in our security measures and are immediately fixing them.” On Friday, Grok announced that it would turn off the image-generating function for users who are not paying customers, but The Verge found Its tools “remain easily accessible to any X user”. Musk, for his part, seems indifferent to all this, and maybe even a little amused. He said: “Anyone using Grok to create illegal content will face the same consequences as uploading illegal content” – but he also responded to posts about the ongoing problem of deepfake porn on his site with a series of laughy-faces and flame emojis. CNN’s report shows Musk has been highly resistant to what he sees censorship Grok, and before the child sexual abuse material controversy erupted, has expressed frustration over restrictions on bots in recent weeks.
Regulatory action will not be forthcoming; At least not in America. Meanwhile, the Trump administration Intervened in an attempt to stop all state-level efforts to prevent misuse of AIAn executive order signed in December aimed to consider state regulations of AI was intended to supersede security and consumer protection efforts. The move comes as the Trump administration has taken an increasingly liberal regulatory stance toward AI as tech companies have been major contributors to Trump’s campaign. Inauguration And the Ballroom Fund.
This incident is a lesson about the dangers of intense and unregulated technology: it is no coincidence that among many users, the first thing they thought of doing with AI was to harass and humiliate women, eliminating their access to public life and further reinforcing unjust hierarchies. But here the power of technology seems secondary to the power of money. xAI, its chatbots and image-generating products could be built differently if the person controlling them had different priorities. If a man with Musk’s low IQ, busy brain, dull humor and gross, smug misogyny were not the richest man in the world, the world would not be subject to his disgrace. Then again, maybe it was money that made Musk the way he is: He has the erudite abilities of someone who never has to do anything uncomfortable, who never has to be challenged, who never has to face consequences, and who never says no.
Either way, the only way out of the mess Musk and Groke have created is to tax Musk enough so that he is no longer so rich that his character failures shape the public sphere – so that his indifference towards non-consensual and pedophilia material created by his companies does not result in misogyny, sexual harassment of Groke’s victims and the public at large. We don’t have to live like this: We can take Musk’s power to hurt and take us away from him. We can stop his stupidity from becoming our problem. The Trump administration will not take responsibility for freeing America from the ill effects of Musk’s money. Americans must fight for a government that will do this.
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Moira Donegan is a Guardian American columnist
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This article was updated on January 9, 2026, to note that Grok said the image-generating service has been shut down to users who do not subscribe.
