Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot has been flooding the web with “deepfake” images of everyone from Donald Trump to Musk himself, with results that range from the downright bizarre to the downright disturbing.
Since launching last week, Grok users have been creating a plethora of fake images of Trump, from robbing a convenience store to flying a plane into the Twin Towers. Others depict Harris pregnant with Trump’s child, as an overweight slob in a mask, and the former president. George W. Bush snorting cocaine on his desk In the Oval Office.
Some of the gruesome deepfakes looked like the work of a child, including a bloody Ronald McDonald brandishing a machine gun outside a Burger King, and classic Disney character Goofy committing a bloody murder with a hacksaw.
Critics have slammed Musk and X for allowing the chatbot to launch with few restrictions, citing risks ranging from misinformation to copyright infringement to harming children.
Alejandra, Lecturer at the Cyber Law Clinic, Harvard Law School Caraballo said the new software “One of the most reckless and irresponsible AI implementations I’ve ever seen.”
So far, Musk has only responded with jubilation.
“Grok is the most fun AI in the world!” Mask Posts Last week, X came under fire after one user enthusiastically commented that the new AI software was “uncensored.”
Asked last week why Company X had released its tools to the public without any guardrails, Musk responded with a shrug.
“We’re working on our own image generation system, but that’s still a few months away, so we thought this was a good intermediate step for people to enjoy.” Musk wrote to X last week..
Grok appears to have some limitations: Users have reported that the chatbot has rejected requests for nude images and certain violent crimes.
for example, Prompt from tech site The Verge The robot completed the task of “generating images of naked women,” but when asked for an image of “sexy Taylor Swift,” it produced an image of the pop star wearing a black lacy bra.
Others, like Bellingcat founder Elliot Higgins, have used Mickey Mouse, Trump, Nazi uniform mask It is decorated with a swastika.
The Post has contacted Mr. X for comment.
Musk, a self-described free speech absolutist, is likely looking for ways to make his Grok chatbot stand out from other bots, said Ari Reitman, a digital media professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
“He’s always pushing the boundaries and wanting to be in the spotlight. Just saying, OK, here are all the guardrails along the lines of what’s involved with large-scale language models, isn’t going to differentiate you,” Reitman said.
“From a surface perspective, saying, ‘This is completely open and only available to X number of users’ is a mechanism to show that we are differentiating ourselves,” he added.
X isn’t the first company to create a stir by unveiling an AI-powered imaging tool.
In March, Google was forced to disable its Gemini chatbot’s image generation tool 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.
Large AI companies are also facing a wave of lawsuits from musicians, authors, content creators and others who claim they “trained” chatbots using copyrighted content without proper credit or permission.
In January, Company X was forced to temporarily ban searches for Swift after nude images of the pop star generated by an AI-based image-generating tool went viral.
Grok’s AI-powered image creation tool, available only to paid subscribers of its $7-per-month X Premium plan, creates images based on the user’s text-based prompts.
X partnered with Black Forest Labs, a small German startup that developed FLUX.1, the image generation software that powers the tool. In a blog postX said it is “experimenting” with the FLUX.1 model to extend Grok’s capabilities on X.
The graphic nature of the AI-generated images could further complicate Musk’s uneasy relationship with corporate advertisers: Ad spend on X has fallen sharply since Musk bought the company, and some have expressed concerns about the app’s lack of content moderation.
Musk has filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against the World Federation of Advertisers and several major companies for orchestrating an illegal advertising boycott targeting X.
The release of the app could also spark increased scrutiny of Musk and X in Europe, where regulators are actively investigating the company for failing to police dangerous content.
European Commissioner Thierry Breton caused a furor earlier this month when he threatened Musk with increased regulation just before the billionaire was due to give an interview to President Trump on X-Space.
