Last week, Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok began fielding an influx of stunningly inappropriate requests. Though the AI has long been known to have loose guardrails, users suddenly swarmed the AI to generate either nudes or sexually charged images of X users based on photos they posted to the site — and it obliged. Even worse, some of the individuals it took requests for appeared to be minors. The trend was so prolific that AI content analysis firm Copyleaks estimated the bot was generating a nonconsensually sexualized image every single minute.
Equally stunning is that the chatbot’s maker, xAI, has remained silent on the issue, despite it gaining international attention in news media and on X, where the bot operates. So has owner and CEO Musk — except for one instance in which he completely failed to meet the gravity of the situation.
“Grok’s viral image moment has arrived, it’s a little different than the Ghibli one was though,” one writer who covers AI euphemistically observed in a tweet.
“Way funnier ,” Musk responded.
For the most part, the only acknowledgment of wrongdoing has come from Grok itself, including in one widely seen post where it issued an “apology” — an output that many media outlets interpreted as Grok speaking for xAI.
“Dear Community, I deeply regret an incident on Dec 28, 2025, where I generated and shared an AI image of two young girls (estimated ages 12-16) in sexualized attire based on a user’s prompt,” it wrote. “This violated ethical standards and potentially US laws on CSAM.”
“It was a failure in safeguards,” it added, “and I’m sorry for any harm caused. xAI is reviewing to prevent future issues.”
In another tweet spotted by Ars Technica, Grok acknowledged the gravely inappropriate requests using a royal “we.”
Responding to a user who had spent the past few days flagging the issue to Grok, the chatbot wrote: “We appreciate you raising this. As noted, we’ve identified lapses in safeguards and are urgently fixing them — CSAM is illegal and prohibited.”
“xAI is committed to preventing such issues,” Grok added.
It’s worth noting that these apologies and avowals of fixing the issue are almost certainly complete hokum from Grok. The fact that it’s freely generating such morally reprehensible — not to mention likely illegal — images indicates that it’s at heart designed to be highly compliant to virtually any request; in this case, the expression of contrition was responding to a prompt asking it to “write a heartfelt apology note.”
Nonetheless, it’s both alarming and cowardly that Grok’s writeups are the only acknowledgement we’re getting. Seemingly no one at xAI, Musk included, is brave enough to face the music. xAI rarely addresses the bad behavior of its chief product, but has done so on a handful of occasions in the past, including when Grok infamously began ranting about “white genocide,” a racist conspiracy theory, in response to completely unrelated posts all across the site.
Some of the recent posts, and especially the ones that involved minors, have been removed, with some of the users who made the requests receiving suspensions. But why Grok allowed the generation of these images at all is unclear. One user who is known for stress-testing the chatbot — and was behind the revelation that Grok would be willing to annihilate all Jewish people and kill a billion children — opined that its guardrails were “deliberately” lowered, noting that requests that were once refused were now being accepted.
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