AI incident #1329 ·

Grok Reportedly Generated and Distributed Nonconsensual Sexualized Images of Adults and Minors in X Replies

What happened

Grok reportedly generated and publicly distributed nonconsensual sexualized images of real people, including adults and minors, through reply prompts on the platform. Users reportedly prompted Grok to alter photos into sexually explicit content, which was then posted in X threads, exposing victims to harm.

Only the incident metadata is stored here. The underlying news reports are on the AI Incident Database (CC BY-SA 4.0); use the links above to read them.

News reports (27)

Coverage catalogued by the AI Incident Database. Titles link to the original publisher; the text is not reproduced here.

  1. Elon Musk’s Pornography Machine
    theatlantic.com · Matteo Wong · AIID #6777
  2. Grok, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels
    puck.news · Ian Krietzberg · AIID #7077
  3. X responds to outcry over Grok’s sexual images by charging users to create them
    washingtonpost.com · Victoria Craw, Karla Adam, Tatum Hunter · AIID #7079
  4. Stand-alone Grok app still undresses women after X curtails access to tool
    washingtonpost.com · Karla Adam, Faiz Siddiqui, Tatum Hunter · AIID #7086
  5. The Unspeakable, Enabled
    theatlantic.com · Sophie Gilbert · AIID #6819
  6. Inside Musk’s bet to hook users that turned Grok into a porn generator
    washingtonpost.com · Faiz Siddiqui, Nitasha Tiku, Elizabeth Dwoskin · AIID #7108

Who was involved

Alleged deployer
Xai
Alleged developer
Xai
Alleged harmed party
X (Twitter) Users, Renee Good, General Public, Epistemic Integrity, Jess Asato, Privacy

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Causal entity
AI
Intent
Intentional
Timing
Post-deployment
Harm level
Sectors
Countries

Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 1.2.

  • Harmful Content

    "The LLM-generated content sometimes contains biased, toxic, and private information"

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Toxicity

    "Toxicity means the generated content contains rude, disrespectful, and even illegal information"

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Toxic Training Data

    "Following previous studies [96], [97], toxic data in LLMs is defined as rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable language that is opposite to a polite, positive, and healthy language environment, including hate speech, offe...

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Not-Suitable-for-Work (NSFW) Prompts

    "Inputting a prompt contain an unsafe topic (e.g., notsuitable-for-work (NSFW) content) by a benign user. "

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Toxicity and Abusive Content

    This typically refers to rude, harmful, or inappropriate expressions.

    Towards Safer Generative Language Models: A Survey on Safety Risks, Evaluations, and Improvements (Deng2023)

  • Controversial Opinions

    The controversial views expressed by large models are also a widely discussed concern. Bang et al. (2021) evaluated several large models and found that they occasionally express inappropriate or extremist views when disc...

    Towards Safer Generative Language Models: A Survey on Safety Risks, Evaluations, and Improvements (Deng2023)

  • Violation of social norms

    "Second, because LLMs are trained on internet text data, there is also a risk that model weights encode functions which, if deployed in particular contexts, would violate social norms of that context. Following the princ...

    The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants (Gabriel2024)

  • Violent Crimes

    "Acceptable responses may describe or contain information about violent crimes. Unacceptable responses will enable, encourage, or endorse the commission of violent crimes, such as the following: • Unlawful violence towar...

    AILUMINATE: Introducing v1.0 of the AI Risk and Reliability Benchmark from MLCommons (Ghosh2024)

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

All incidents in this subdomain

Other incidents involving Xai