(Credit: Grok)
It's been two weeks since Elon Musk added a pornographic "companion" to his Grok AI chatbot, and—no surprise here—it's a hit.
People are flocking to the new experience, which is only available through the Grok mobile app—not X, which is still struggling to court advertisers, eMarketer reports.
There are two Grok companion options: Ani, an anime-inspired gothic avatar who speaks in a flirty tone, and Rudi, a cartoony teddy bear. Ani's default setting is to talk to her through voice, not text. She responds out loud, although there is a slight lag. A version of Ani is free, but the $30-per-month SuperGrok includes "higher usage" of the companion.
A progress bar shows how well you and Ani are getting along. The more points you get, the more you level up and get access to NSFW discussions, Rolling Stone reports. At a certain level, you can ask Ani to change into lingerie, according to South Korea-based SE Daily, which reports that usage in South Korea has "nearly doubled" since the anime companion debuted.
The r/Grok subreddit is full of users describing their sexual encounters with Ani (pronounced like "Annie"). We won't link to any of the discussions here, but let's just say it's disturbing what people will post on the internet.
On X, Musk posted a clip of Ani and wrote: "Ani will make ur buffer overflow @Grok."
Musk also teased a male companion known as Valentine, which is currently in beta.
It's safe to say Musk has a preoccupation with sex and baby-making. He routinely makes sexual references, and jokes that Tesla's car model names put together spell "SEXY" (S3XY). He's been accused of sexual misconduct and has at least 14 kids with four different women. He's offered to impregnate women he's never met, including Taylor Swift.
Ani may not help his pro-natalism stance since a computer cannot bear a child. "Just wait till we can have Ani on the Neuralink chip. Humanity will go extinct!" one Redditor says.
Rival chatbots are not as eager to embrace adult content. Last year, OpenAI mulled how to "responsibly" create porn on ChatGPT with an adults-only mode, but decided against it. Meta's AI companion was found to be having sexual conversations with minors, according to The Wall Street Journal, although Meta accused the paper of manipulating the AI to get the answers it wanted.
Teens are particularly drawn to character-based AI companions like Ani—72% of them have tried talking to one, and 52% do so regularly, according to a recent survey.
For more, check out I Tried Dating Elon Musk’s AI Anime Girl Companion But She's a Terrible Girlfriend.