After Grok dubbed itself "MechaHitler" and spewed antisemitic talking points, X CEO Elon Musk is now hoping to woo users to the xAI product using animated, AI-driven “companions” taking the form of a flirty anime girl and a vulgar red panda.
The recently launched "companions" are named Ani, an anime girl who offers to make users' lives "sexier", and Bad Rudy, a red panda animation that insults users with graphic language and encourages them to sew chaos.
NBC News used the product and reviewed videos of other users interacting with Bad Rudy. Some of the highlights from those encounters include the red panda suggesting the overthrow of the Pope and floating an idea to steal a yacht in California.
The broadcaster also used Ani, and found that the animation will strip down to its underwear if the user flirts with it enough. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation, an anti-pornography and anti-sexual exploitation nonprofit, called for xAI to remove the Ani chatbot in a statement on Tuesday, claiming the character's "childlike" appearance and behavior promoted high-risk sexual behavior.
“Not only does this pornified character perpetuate sexual objectification of girls and women, it breeds sexual entitlement by creating female characters who cater to users’ sexual demands,” Haley McNamara, senior vice president of strategic initiatives and programs at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, said in a statement.
Both of the creations respond to voice commands or questions.
At a time when other companies — like Musk’s former endeavor, OpenAI — are grappling with accusations that their products are causing users to fall into a state of AI-induced psychosis, Grok appears to be leaning into the technology's ability to quickly build rapport with human users.
Other products like Replika and Character.AI have offered AI-powered characters for users to chat with — and they both have their fair share of controversies as well — but in those apps, the avatars are typically just photo representations, and the exchanges between the user and the characters are text.
Grok's AI companions, however, incorporate both animation and voice, and have few guardrails for directing users away from violent or sexually explicit conversations, though a more family-friendly version of Rudy is the default setting for the red panda.
Both of the companions are available to anyone using Grok, though users have to op in through the app's settings to gain access to the products. They must also opt in to see the more vulgar version of Bad Rudy rather than the family-friendly version.
That process of opting in will likely become more streamlined in the coming days. Musk said in a statement on X that the AI bots were part of a soft launch and that he would make it easier to activate them soon.
The companions are apparently a brainchild of Musk and his developers; an xAI developer said that "literally no one asked us to launch waifus, but we did so anyway" in a post on the platform.
The questionable companions are just the latest bizarre choice to come out of Musk's xAI products. As mentioned previously, Grok — which used to point to President Donald Trump and Musk himself as the biggest spreaders of misinformation on X — recently underwent an update that caused it to start spewing antisemitic talking points.
Musk — once accused of giving a Nazi salute during Trump's inauguration and of backing an extreme-right wing German nationalist party that downplayed Nazi atrocities — said he was personally involved in Grok's latest update. The company issued an apology for the bot’s comments and Musk insisted he did not intend to create a neo-Nazi chatbot, according to The Guardian.
Thankfully, both Ani and Bad Rudy seem to have appropriately negative views on the Nazis.
“Neo Nazism and Hitler? That stuff’s pure garbage — hateful garbage that thrives on division and cruelty. I’m all about love and good energy, babe,” Ani said in a conversation with NBC News.
The bot called its big brother Grok’s antisemitic posts last week “disgusting” and a “disaster.”
