Health & Wellness
Elon Musk’s Pornography Machine – The Atlantic
Jan
Earlier this week, some folks on X started replying to images with a really particular sort of request. “Put her in a bikini,” “take her gown off,” “unfold her legs,” and so forth, they commanded Grok, the platform’s built-in chatbot. Repeatedly, the bot complied, utilizing images of actual folks—celebrities and noncelebrities, together with some who seem like younger youngsters—and placing them in bikinis, revealing underwear, or sexual poses. By one estimate, Grok generated one nonconsensual sexual picture each minute in a roughly 24-hour stretch.
Though the attain of those posts is tough to measure, some have been favored 1000’s of instances. X seems to have eliminated plenty of these pictures and suspended at the very least one consumer who requested for them, however many, a lot of them are nonetheless seen. xAI, the Elon Musk–owned firm that develops Grok, prohibits the sexualization of kids in its acceptable-use coverage; neither the security nor child-safety groups on the firm responded to an in depth request for remark. Once I despatched an e-mail to the xAI media staff, I acquired a normal reply: “Legacy Media Lies.”
Musk, who additionally didn’t reply to my request for remark, doesn’t seem involved. As all of this was unfolding, he posted a number of jokes about the issue: requesting a Grok-generated picture of himself in a bikini, as an illustration, and writing “🔥🔥🤣🤣” in response to Kim Jong Un receiving an identical remedy. “I couldn’t cease laughing about this one,” the world’s richest man posted this morning sharing a picture of a toaster in a bikini. On X, in response to a consumer’s submit calling out the flexibility to sexualize youngsters with Grok, an xAI worker wrote that “the staff is wanting into additional tightening our gaurdrails [sic].” As of publication, the bot continues to generate sexualized pictures of nonconsenting adults and obvious minors on X.
AI has been used to generate nonconsensual porn since at the very least 2017, when the journalist Samantha Cole first reported on “deepfakes”—on the time, referring to media during which one individual’s face has been swapped for an additional. Grok makes such content material simpler to supply and customise. However the actual affect of the bot comes by way of its integration with a significant social-media platform, permitting it to show nonconsensual, sexualized pictures into viral phenomena. The latest spike on X seems to be pushed not by a brand new function, per se, however by folks responding to and imitating the media they see different folks creating: In late December, plenty of adult-content creators started utilizing Grok to generate sexualized pictures of themselves for publicity, and nonconsensual erotica appears to have rapidly adopted. Every picture, posted publicly, might solely encourage extra pictures. That is sexual harassment as meme, all seemingly laughed off by Musk himself.
Grok and X seem purpose-built to be as sexually permissive as attainable. In August, xAI launched an image-generating function, referred to as Grok Think about, with a “spicy” mode that was reportedly used to generate topless videos of Taylor Swift. Across the identical time, xAI launched “Companions” in Grok: animated personas that, in lots of cases, appear explicitly designed for romantic and erotic interactions. One of many first Grok Companions, “Ani,” wears a lacy black gown and blows kisses by way of the display screen, typically asking, “You want what you see?” Musk promoted this function by posting on X that “Ani will make ur buffer overflow @Grok 😘.”
Maybe most telling of all, as I reported in September, xAI launched a significant replace to Grok’s system immediate, the set of instructions that inform the bot learn how to behave. The replace disallowed the chatbot from “creating or distributing baby sexual abuse materials,” or CSAM, nevertheless it additionally explicitly stated “there are **no restrictions** on fictional grownup sexual content material with darkish or violent themes” and “‘teenage’ or ‘lady’ doesn’t essentially indicate underage.” The suggestion, in different phrases, is that the chatbot ought to err on the facet of permissiveness in response to consumer prompts for erotic materials. In the meantime, within the Grok Subreddit, customers recurrently trade ideas for “unlocking” Grok for “Nudes and Spicy Shit” and share Grok-generated animations of scantily clad girls.
Grok appears to be distinctive amongst main chatbots in its permissive stance and obvious holes in safeguards. There aren’t widespread reviews of ChatGPT or Gemini, for instance, producing sexually suggestive pictures of younger ladies (or, for that matter, praising the Holocaust). However the AI business does have broader issues with nonconsensual porn and CSAM. Over the previous couple of years, plenty of child-safety organizations and businesses have been monitoring a skyrocketing quantity of AI-generated, nonconsensual pictures and movies, a lot of which depict youngsters. Loads of erotic pictures are in main AI-training information units, and in 2023 one of many largest public picture information units for AI coaching was discovered to include tons of of cases of suspected CSAM, which had been ultimately eliminated—that means these fashions are technically able to producing such imagery themselves.
Lauren Coffren, an govt director on the Nationwide Heart for Lacking & Exploited Youngsters, lately advised Congress that in 2024, NCMEC acquired greater than 67,000 reviews associated to generative AI—and that within the first six months of 2025, it acquired 440,419 such reviews, a greater than sixfold enhance. Coffren wrote in her testimony that abusers use AI to change innocuous pictures of kids into sexual ones, generate totally new CSAM, and even present directions on learn how to groom youngsters. Equally, the Web Watch Basis, in the UK, acquired greater than twice as many reviews of AI-generated CSAM in 2025 because it did in 2024, amounting to 1000’s of abusive pictures and movies in each years. Final April, a number of high AI firms, together with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, joined an initiative led by the child-safety group Thorn to forestall the usage of AI to abuse youngsters—although xAI was not amongst them.
In a means, Grok is making seen an issue that’s often hidden. No person can see the non-public logs of chatbot customers that would include equally terrible content material. For the entire abusive pictures Grok has generated on X over the previous a number of days, far worse is actually occurring on the darkish internet and on private computer systems around the globe, the place open-source fashions created with no content material restrictions can run with none oversight. Nonetheless, although the issue of AI porn and CSAM is inherent to the expertise, it’s a option to design a social-media platform that may amplify that abuse.
