Grok is undressing women and children. Don’t expect the US to take action | Moira Donegan

Fri, 09 Jan 2026

Elon Musk’s reckless and degrading AI could be built differently. But Americans will have to speak up

Over the past year, Elon Musk has made a series of protocol changes to Grok, the proprietary AI chatbot of his company xAI, which runs prominently on his social media site X, formerly Twitter. Many of these changes have been geared to make the bot more amenable to producing pornography. In August, Grok launched an image generator, branded as Grok Imagine, which featured a service geared toward creating nude, suggestive or sexually explicit content, including computer-generated pornographic images of real women. The feature, which was quickly used to create naked images of celebrities such as Taylor Swift, also allowed users to create brief videos, complete with animations and sounds.

Musk also rolled out AI girlfriends on the platform: animated personas – including female characters with exaggerated breasts and hips – that interacted in sexually explicit ways with users. One of the characters, “Ani”, was an anime-style cartoon blonde with a series of skimpy outfits; the bot blew kisses and addressed users as “my love” while directing the chats toward sexual content.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

This article was updated on 9 January 2026 to note that Grok said the image-generating service had been turned off for users who do not subscribe.