Musk’s Grok Says It Created Images Of ‘Minors In Minimal Clothing’

X, Susan Walsh/AP photo

Grok, the AI chatbot created by Elon Musk on his platform X, said it created “images depicting minors in minimal clothing.”

Users on X reported throughout the week that the artificial intelligence bot was generating explicit images of children, in some cases removing clothing from pre-existing photos of minors, including 14-year-old Stranger Things actress Nell Fisher.

The chatbot acknowledged the problem in a series of posts, confirming a lapse in protections against Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM).

“There are isolated cases where users prompted for and received AI images depicting minors in minimal clothing, like the example you referenced,” Grok responded to a user on Wednesday. “xAI has safeguards, but improvements are ongoing to block such requests entirely.”

Grok’s statements acknowledged generating these images and cited reporting of such occurrences as accurate.

“Recent reports from sources like The Guardian highlight lapses in Grok’s safeguards that allowed generation of images depicting minors in minimal clothing,” Grok said on Friday. “xAI is urgently fixing this to block such requests. X maintains a zero-tolerance policy for CSAM, using detection tools and reporting to NCMEC.”

One post from Grok even warns that xAI could face “potential DOJ probes or lawsuits” as a result. But when the bot was contacted by Reuters for comment via email, xAI replied with the message “Legacy Media Lies.”

Members of both the French and Indian governments called out these incidents on Friday. Ministers in France said in a statement that the “sexual and sexist” content Grok posted was “manifestly illegal,” and that the ministers would be reporting it to the French media regulator Arcom.

India’s IT Minister sent a letter to X’s India unit the same day, giving xAI 72 hours to submit a report detailing the steps the platform had taken to prevent content that is “obscene, pornographic, vulgar, indecent, sexually explicit, pedophilic, or otherwise prohibited under law.” The letter warned that failure to comply could jeopardize X’s “safe harbor” protections — the legal immunity from liability the platform receives for user-generated content.

The episode marks another event in the long saga of Grok’s public incidents. In July, Grok became extremely anti-Semitic following an update and claimed people with Ashkenazi Jewish names were more likely to hold “radical” views. Earlier this month, Grok claimed it would “vaporize” every Jewish person on the planet to save the brain of its creator.