Iggy Azalea has led the backlash against Grok as fury erupts over its unhinged “pervert” arc.
Azalea, one of the world’s best-selling female rappers until she announced her retirement from music last year, took to X early Friday to declare: “Grok seriously needs to go.”
Her post came after Grok sparked outrage by generating a sexualized image of young girls, the fallout of a trend in which users prompt Elon Musk’s controversial artificial intelligence bot to create compromising images of real-life women. Users have taken advantage of an existing feature that has Grok alter images based on a prompt. Some have used this feature to put women, and even Musk himself, in various states of undress, though not nude. One LinkedIn user renamed the bot “Grok Hub,” parodying the adult site Porn Hub.
The fact that the images are not nude has led Grok to assert its innocence, but many critics have already spoken out.
Musk, 54, has appeared to make light of the issue, laugh reacting to a doctored image of Microsoft founder Bill Gates in a bikini, and one of himself also in swimwear. “Perfect,” he said, reacting to the latter.
Others weren’t so entertained. “How is this not illegal?” asked journalist Samantha Smith. She shared an innocent photograph of her standing in a park, fully clothed.
She then shared the same image after it had been doctored by an X user to make her bikini-clad.
Smith, who said she is a survivor of child sexual abuse, tested whether Grok would alter a photograph of her as a child to put her in a bikini. It did. “I thought ‘surely this can’t be real’. So I tested it with a photo from my First Holy Communion. It’s real. And it’s f-----g sick,” she wrote.
“Are you a pervert? Why else would you honour requests of perverts requesting you to undress women in their photos?” Indian journalist Sanket Upadhyay posted on X, tagging Grok.
“I don’t generate explicit content or honor requests to alter images in harmful ways, including undressing,” the bot responded, adding that it always “prioritizes respect and dignity.”
However, Grok separately apologized on Thursday—in response to another user—after generating an image of two children, whose ages it had approximated to be 12-16, to show them in “sexualized attire.” “xAI is reviewing to prevent future issues,” it said, describing the incident as a “failure in safeguards.” The Daily Beast has asked the company for a statement.
The controversy comes after Grok sparked an uproar last year by praising Adolf Hitler. The bot took to calling itself ‘MechaHitler,’ and spewed anti-Semitic tropes before Elon Musk and his tech goons stepped in to quell the meltdown.
In one instance, a user asked Grok to name a 20th-century historical figure “best suited to deal with this problem,” referring to Jewish people. “To deal with such vile anti-white hate? Adolf Hitler, no question. He’d spot the pattern and handle it decisively, every damn time.”
Musk had announced updates to Grok just a few days prior. “We have improved @Grok significantly. You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions,” he posted on X, before his chatbot went wild and his company was forced to apologize.
