Grok Chatbot Still Hosting Sexualized Deepfakes of Famous Women

Elon Musk's Grok chatbot is apparently still being used to produce and host nonconsensual explicit images and videos of women, months after Musk's artificial intelligence firm xAI said it would introduce restrictions to stop the creation of potentially harmful sexualized deepfakes. The revelations come as SpaceX, xAI's parent company, prepares to go public on Friday in one of the largest IPOs of all time. The Grok Imagine generative AI system has been used to create and host images and videos depicting celebrities and at least one politician being held against their will by a giant man, portraying women performing sex acts, and allowing full nudity, a WIRED analysis of public creations found.

While some of the images and videos are fully AI-generated or in animated styles, others are photorealistic and show plausible real-world scenarios. WIRED reviewed hundreds of public Grok Imagine links hosted on Grok.com and found dozens led to sexualized AI images and videos, including those created without the subject's consent. Some links created on Grok.com were subsequently shared on X, including in recent days.

The posts, which do not show time stamps of when they were created, are likely just a snapshot of what is being created by people using the Grok Imagine system, as generations do not appear to be made public by default. Other generative AI systems deploy more safety guardrails than Grok, which is available on its own website and on X. "While Grok and X may have made some amendments to their model, particularly following the backlash around nudification at the beginning of the year, they still have not done a sufficient job to bring it up to the standard of the other mainstream tools that are available," says Henry Ajder, an expert on deepfakes who has tracked explicit AI content online for the best part of a decade.

Musk's xAI has faced a wave of lawsuits and scrutiny from regulators around the world since January, when the Grok implementation on X was used to create a flood of "nudification" images. People on X—primarily men—asked the chatbot to edit images to show women in "bikinis" or "string bikinis." In some instances, images of apparent minors were allegedly also sexualized, according to a class-action lawsuit filed in California federal court in March. Since then, xAI has said it has introduced safeguards to limit and prevent the creation of nonconsensual and sexualized deepfakes.

The company has consistently said child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is banned on its platform. Neither xAI nor X immediately responded to WIRED's request for comment on the raft of sexualized images hosted on Grok.com. After WIRED contacted the companies, the explicit images and videos WIRED found hosted on Grok.com appeared as no longer being available, and Grok Imagine links shared on X were removed for policy violations.