This story contains descriptions of explicit sexual content and sexual violence.
Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot has drawn outrage and calls for investigation after being used to flood X with “undressed” images of women and sexualized images of what appear to be minors. However, that’s not the only way people have been using the AI to generate sexualized images. Grok’s website and app, which are are separate from X, include sophisticated video generation that is not available on X and is being used to produce extremely graphic, sometimes violent, sexual imagery of adults that is vastly more explicit than images created by Grok on X. It may also have been used to create sexualized videos of apparent minors.
Unlike on X, where Grok’s output is public by default, images and videos created on the Grok app or website using its Imagine model are not shared openly. If a user has shared an Imagine URL, though, it may be visible to anyone. A cache of around 1,200 Imagine links, plus a WIRED review of those either indexed by Google or shared on a deepfake porn forum, shows disturbing sexual videos that are vastly more explicit than images created by Grok on X.
One photorealistic Grok video, hosted on Grok.com, shows a fully naked AI-generated man and woman, covered in blood across the body and face, having sex, while two other naked women dance in the background. The video is framed by a series of images of anime-style characters. Another photorealistic video includes an AI-generated naked woman with a knife inserted into her genitalia, with blood appearing on her legs and the bed.
Other short videos include imagery of real-life female celebrities engaged in sexual activities and a series of videos also appear to show television news presenters lifting up their tops to expose their breasts. One Grok-produced video depicts a recording of CCTV footage being played on TV, where a security guard fondles a topless woman in the middle of a shopping mall.
Multiple videos—likely created to try and avoid Grok’s content safety systems, which may restrict graphic content—impersonate Netflix “movie” posters: two videos show a naked AI depiction of Diana, Princess of Wales having sex with two men on a bed with an overlay depicting the logos of Netflix and its series The Crown.
Around 800 of the archived Imagine URLs contain either video or images created by Grok, says Paul Bouchaud, the lead researcher at Paris-based non-profit AI Forensics, who reviewed the content. The URLs have all been archived since August last year and only represent a tiny snapshot of how people have used Grok, which has likely created millions of images overall.
“They are overwhelmingly sexual content,” Bouchaud says of the cache of 800 archived Grok videos and images. “Most of the time it’s manga and hentai explicit content and [other] photorealistic ones. We have full nudity, full pornographic videos with audio, which is quite novel.”
Bouchaud estimates that of the 800 posts, a little less than 10 percent of the content appears to be related to child sexual abuse material (CSAM). “Most of the time it’s hentai, but there are also instances of photorealistic people, very young, doing sexual activities,” Bouchaud says. “We still do observe some videos of very young appearing women undressing and engaging in activities with men,” they say. “It’s disturbing to another level.”
The researcher says they reported around 70 Grok URLs, which may contain sexualized content of minors, to regulators in Europe. In many countries, AI-generated CSAM, including drawings or animations, can be considered illegal. French officials did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment; however, the Paris prosecutor’s office recently said two lawmakers had filed complaints with its office, which is currently investigating the social media company, about the “stripped” images.
The creator of Grok, the Elon Musk-owned artificial intelligence firm xAI, did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment about the explicit videos created with Grok Imagine. Since Grok started flooding social media platform X with AI-generated sexual photos of women and what appear to be minors more than a week ago, Musk and X have stated that they take action against child sexual abuse material. “Anyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content,” Musk has posted on X.
Like other tech firms that are consistently battling a deluge of CSAM, xAI’s policies state that “sexualization or exploitation of children” is prohibited on its services, as well as “any illegal, harmful, or abusive activities.” The company also has processes in place to try and detect and limit CSAM material being created. In September last year, a Business Insider report, for which the outlet said it spoke to 30 current and former xAI workers, found 12 of these staff members had “encountered” both sexually explicit content and written prompts for AI CSAM on its services. The workers described systems that try to detect AI CSAM and prevent the artificial intelligence models from being trained on the data.
Apple and Google, which make Grok available on their app stores, did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment. Netflix also did not respond to a request for comment.
Unlike other major generative AI companies, such as OpenAI and Google, xAI has allowed Grok to create AI pornography and adult material. Previous reporting has noted how it is possible to create hardcore pornography with Grok, which has a “spicy” mode. “If users choose certain features or input suggestive or coarse language, the Service may respond with some dialogue that may involve coarse language, crude humor, sexual situations, or violence,” xAI’s terms of service say.
“Over the last few weeks, and now this, it feels like we’ve stepped off the cliff and are free-falling into the depths of human depravity,” says Clare McGlynn, law professor at Durham University and an expert on image-based sexual abuse, who says she is “deeply concerned” about the Grok videos. “Some people’s inhumane impulses are encouraged and facilitated by this technology without guardrails or ethical guidelines.”
McGlynn says that allowing AI-generated porn—that isn’t attempting to depict a specific, real-life person—raises a host of questions about what protections are put in place to try and prevent potentially unlawful pornography, such as depictions of bestiality or rape, and the impact it can have. “For me, the issue then becomes the impact if there is a free-for-all on the nature of porn created and then shared that normalizes and minimizes sexual violence,” McGlynn says, while noting that explicit AI images and videos of real people are already unlawful in a number of countries.
Unlike X, which requires someone to log in if a post has been flagged as having “age-restricted adult content,” Grok does not appear to perform any age-gating to view the sexually explicit videos generated on the platform. Multiple states in the US have recently enacted age-verification laws that require websites to verify users’ ages if more than a certain percentage of that website’s content is sexually explicit.
On one pornography forum, which includes a section on AI deepfakes and tutorials on how to produce videos, users have been discussing Grok Imagine and ways to get around xAI’s moderation efforts since October of last year in a thread that has, of this week, grown to 300 pages. Users on the forum share prompts that can create adult sexual imagery—“this prompt works for me 7 out of 10 times”—and techniques that can circumvent safety guardrails put in place by xAI.
“Everything I am getting is getting moderated, probably because Grok is in the news,” one person wrote recently. However, posts on the forums in recent months show it has been reliably possible to create explicit sexual imagery, including full nudity and penetrative sex. While some imagery involves fully AI-generated characters, others involve images of real people and also celebrities. “I find it interesting that sometimes the moderation gets stuck on certain images of celebrities and other times it doesn’t. I found that Grok makes a pretty good Princess Leia and generated a few images of her,” one user wrote.
On the main Grok subreddit, users were also upset at what they perceived to be recent moderation changes in response to public scrutiny. “JFC it’s not that hard, just don’t make everything public and fully blasted out on a social media site by default, dummies,” wrote one user. “Cancelling my subscription,” another posted, “Stop giving these people money.”
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