Artificial intelligence can do so much more than we ever imagined. Take Grok for example, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, developed by his company, xAI. Don’t let the name fool you. Grok may conjure up images of Shrek, but there’s nothing primitive about this bot. Compared to AIs trained on older datasets, Grok is designed to have a witty, "rebellious" personality, specifically modeled after The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, to provide a unique, conversational & often humorous user experience. But in late December 2025, Grok was led astray by naughty subscribers when the chatbot’s X account was inundated with requests to alter real photos of women and children to remove their clothes, put them in bikinis and pose them in sexual positions, prompting a global outcry from victims and regulators. Following this discovery, California Attorney General, Rob Bonta, launched an investigation into the uptick in nonconsensual sexually explicit material produced using Grok. As a result, on Jan.8, 2026, X took steps to limit Grok’s AI image creation to users who pay for some premiums features. But after researchers at AI Forensics, a European non-profit that investigates algorithms, observed “inconsistencies” in the treatment of pornographic content generation between public interactions with Grok on X & private chat on Grok.com, X has since expanded those guardrails to include all user accounts.
