Grok’s nonconsensual porn problem is part of a long, gross legacy

For the past few weeks, Elon Musk’s Grok AI bot has been generating pornographic images of women and underage girls, without their consent, at an astounding rate. A recent Bloomberg analysis found that Grok creates 6,700 such images per hour, or more than one per minute. On Friday, X at last put some minor guardrails on the tool, with a new policy that only paying subscribers can use Grok to generate or alter images. On the standalone Grok app, however, anyone can prompt Grok to generate new images, meaning the deepfaked porn continues. 

Grok has long been one of the more suggestive of the major AI models, with “spicy” and “sexy” settings that can be toggled on and off. While employees have warned that the bot is being used to generate child sex abuse materials, Musk has remained committed to the idea that Grok would be the sexiest AI model. On X, Musk has defended the choice on business grounds, citing the famous tale of how VHS beat Betamax in the 1980s after the porn industry put its weight behind VHS, with its larger storage capacity. “VHS won in the end,” Musk posted, “in part because they allowed spicy mode