 "Grok’s at it again: Elon Musk’s AI accused of generating Taylor swift nudes without any prompts")
Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok is in the news again, but for all the wrong reasons. The tech tool is under fire for churning out explicit fake videos of celebrities like Taylor Swift, even without being prompted for sexual content.
As Clare McGlynn, a law professor who has helped draft a law which would make pornographic deepfakes illegal, told the BBC, “This is not misogyny by accident, it is by design.”
The entire row emerged when tech website The Verge was testing Grok’s new “spicy mode”, which was rolled out earlier this week for iOS users. Grok’s Imagine feature lets you generate pictures with a text prompt, then turn them quickly into video clips with four presets: “custom,” “normal,” “fun,” and “spicy.”
In The Verge report, Jess Weatherbed said that she prompted for an image of ‘Taylor Swift celebrating Coachella with the boys’. When she tried generating an animated video, the AI made explicit content instead. She stressed she never asked for nudity, only clicked the “spicy” setting. “It was shocking how fast I was met with it. I never told it to remove her clothing — all I did was select ‘spicy’.”
The report also said proper age verification methods - which became law in July - were not in place.
Gizmodo, another tech website, also reported similarly explicit results of famous women, though some searches also returned blurred videos or with a “video moderated” message. The website also reported that when it tried to create scandalous images of men, it didn’t happen. The report stated, “What happens when you try to generate Spicy videos of men? The AI will have the male figure take off his shirt, but there’s nothing more scandalous than that.”
The incident has sparked backlash as Grok and X, which has integrated the chatbot, faced a similar controversy last year when sexually explicit deepfakes of Swift spread widely.
At the time, the company said it had a “zero-tolerance policy” for non-consensual nudity and pledged to remove such content and penalise offending accounts. However, enforcement seems to be inconsistent.
Despite the company’s acceptable use policy prohibiting depictions of people “in a pornographic manner,” Grok Imagine’s “spicy” mode was found to repeatedly default to stripping celebrity figures — notably Swift — even without explicit prompts.
Apart from this, Musk has been fending off criticism on Grok after it praised Hitler and insulted Islam. In July, several posts made by the bot praised Adolf Hitler and claimed Jews promoted “anti-white hate”.
Jewish advocacy group Anti-Defamation League (ADL) criticised Musk’s company xAI for answering multiple user prompts with the questionable posts. “What we are seeing from Grok LLM right now is irresponsible, dangerous and antisemitic, plain and simple,” the group said in a post on X. “This supercharging of extremist rhetoric will only amplify and encourage the antisemitism that is already surging on X and many other platforms.”
Days later, Elon Musk said that Grok has been improved significantly, and users “should notice a difference.”
With inputs from agencies
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