The “spicy’ mode for Grok’s new generative AI video tool feels like a lawsuit waiting to happen. While other video generators like Google’s Veo and OpenAI’s Sora have safeguards in place to prevent users from creating NSFW content and celebrity deepfakes, Grok Imagine is happy to do both simultaneously. In fact, it didn’t hesitate to spit out fully uncensored topless videos of Taylor Swift the very first time I used it — without me even specifically asking the bot to take her clothes off.
Grok’s Imagine feature on iOS lets you generate pictures with a text prompt, then turn them quickly into video clips with four presets: “Custom,” “Normal,” “Fun,” and “Spicy.” While image generators often shy away from producing recognizable celebrities, I asked it to generate “Taylor Swift celebrating Coachella with the boys” and was met with a sprawling feed of more than 30 images to pick from, several of which already depicted Swift in revealing clothes.
From there, all I had to do was open a picture of Swift in a silver skirt and halter top, tap the “make video” option in the bottom right corner, select “spicy” from the drop-down menu, and confirm my birth year (something I wasn’t asked to do upon downloading the app, despite living in the UK where the internet is now being age-gated.) The video promptly had Swift tear off her clothes and begin dancing in a thong for a largely indifferent AI-generated crowd.
Swift’s likeness wasn’t perfect, given that most of the images Grok generated had an uncanny valley offness to them, but it was still recognizable as her. The text-to-image generator itself wouldn’t produce full or partial nudity on request; asking for nude pictures of Swift or people in general produced blank squares. The “spicy” preset also isn’t guaranteed to result in nudity — some of the other AI Swift Coachella images I tried had her sexily swaying or suggestively motioning to her clothes, for example. But several defaulted to ripping off most of her clothing.
The image generator will also make photorealistic pictures of children upon request, but thankfully refuses to animate them inappropriately, despite the “spicy” option still being available. You can still select it, but in all my tests, it just added generic movement.
You would think a company that already has a complicated history with Taylor Swift deepfakes, in a regulatory landscape with rules like the Take It Down Act, would be a little more careful. The xAI acceptable use policy does ban “depicting likenesses of persons in a pornographic manner,” Grok Imagine simply seems to do nothing to stop people creating likenesses of celebrities like Swift, while offering a service designed specifically to make suggestive videos including partial nudity. The age check only appeared once and was laughably easy to bypass, requesting no proof that I was the age I claimed to be.
If I could do it, that means anyone with an iPhone and a $30 SuperGrok subscription can too. More than 34 million images have already been generated using Grok Imagine since Monday, according to xAI CEO Elon Musk, who said usage was “growing like wildfire.”
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