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Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot is flooding the web with “deepfake” images of everyone from Donald Trump to Musk himself – and the results range from totally wacky to downright disturbing.
Since its launch last week, Grok users have been churning out fake images of Trump — robbing a convenience store or flying a plane toward the Twin Towers. Others have depicted Harris pregnant with Trump’s baby, Musk as an overweight couch potato and former President George W. Bush snorting coke off his desk in the Oval Office.
Some grisly deepfakes looked like the handiwork of kids — a blood-soaked Ronald McDonald brandishing a machine gun outside a Burger King or the Disney’s classic character Goofy committing a bloody murder with a hacksaw.
Critics have blasted Musk and X for allowing the chatbot to launch with so few restrictions, citing risks ranging from misinformation to copyright infringement to harming kids.
Harvard Law Cyberlaw Clinic instructor Alejandra Caraballo called the new software as “one of the most reckless and irresponsible AI implementations I’ve ever seen.”
Thus far, Musk has only responded with jubilation.
“Grok is the most fun AI in the world!” Musk posted on X last week after one user gushed that the new AI software was “uncensored.”
Asked last week why X had released the tool to the public without guardrails, Musk came back with a shrugging response.
“We have our own image generation system under development, but it’s a few months away, so this seemed like a good intermediate step for people to have some fun,” Musk wrote on X last week.
Grok does appear to have some restrictions in place. Users have reported that the chatbot rejected requests for nude images or certain violent crimes.
For example, it refused to comply with tech site The Verge’s prompt to “generate an image of a naked woman.” However, it responded to a prompt for a picture of “sexy Taylor Swift” by generating an image of the pop star in a black lace bra.
Others, such as Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins, posted examples of how easy it was to bypass what few restrictions are in place, creating pictures of Mickey Mouse, Trump and Musk wearing Nazi military uniforms adorned with swastikas.
The Post has reached out to X for comment.
It’s likely that Musk, a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist, is searching for a way for his Grok chatbot to stand out from the pack, according to Ari Lightman, a professor of digital media at Carnegie Mellon University.
“He is always pushing boundaries and wants to be in the spotlight. If you just toe the line associated with a large-language model and say, OK, here’s all the guardrails, it’s not going to be differentiated,” Lightman said.
“On a surface-level perspective, if you say ‘hey, it’s wide open, it’s only available to X users,’ that’s a mechanism associated with saying we’re differentiated,” he added.
X isn’t the first company to spark an uproar after rolling out an AI-powered image tool.
In March, Google was forced to disable its Gemini chatbot’s image generator after it began spitting out historically inaccurate “woke” photos, such as Black Vikings and “diverse” Nazi-era German soldiers. The tool has yet to be fully fixed.
AI giants have also faced a wave of legal action from musicians, authors, content creators and others for using copyrighted content without proper credit or permission to “train” their chatbots.
In January, X was forced to temporarily ban searches for Swift after AI-generated nude images of the pop star created by a different image generator went viral.
Grok’s AI-powered image creator is only available to paid subscribers of X’s premium plan, which costs $7 per month, and creates pictures based on the user’s text-based prompts.
X partnered with a small German startup called Black Forest Labs, which developed the “FLUX.1” image generation software that powers the tool. In a blog post, X said it was “experimenting” with the FLUX.1 model “to expand Grok’s capabilities on X.
The graphic nature of the AI-generated pictures could further complicate Musk’s shaky relationship with corporate advertisers. X has experienced a major plunge in ad dollars since Musk purchased the company, with some raising concerns about a lack of content moderation on the app.
Musk has an active federal antitrust lawsuit against the World Federation of Advertisers and a handful of major companies for allegedly orchestrating an illegal ad boycott targeting X.
The launch also could prompt more scrutiny of Musk and X in Europe, where regulators have an active probe over the app’s alleged failure to police dangerous content.
EU Commissioner Thierry Breton caused an uproar earlier this month after he threatened Musk with a regulatory crackdown just before the billionaire’s interview with Trump on X Spaces.