Elon Musk is a man who named a government agency after a memecoin, designed a robotaxi test network in the shape of a phallus, and once went to court for tweeting weed jokes in relation to Tesla stock. So it’s not surprising that his company xAI’s first AI companions on the Grok app are a lustful anime girl and a homicidal panda.
You can see why I had no choice but to ask my boss to buy me a $30 “Super Grok” subscription so that I could spend my Tuesday afternoon talking to these characters.
It’s curious timing for xAI to delve into the controversial world of AI girlfriends (and evil forest creatures), given the recent arc of the Grok product. The X account powered by Grok’s AI went on a highly publicized antisemitic tirade last week, which sadly is not an abnormal occurrence for Musk’s AI products. Now, with the release of Grok 4 and its accompanying AI companion, these AIs are more interactive than ever.
Ani is the collective fantasy of the kind of person who would earnestly seek out an amorous AI that Elon Musk made. She wears a short black dress with a tight corset around her waist and thigh-high fishnets, and she is designed to be obsessed with you.
As soon as you click on her name to talk to her, a sultry guitar tune begins to play as she appears in the frame.
“Is that you? Oh, what a relief,” Ani whispers like an ASMR streamer as she sways to the music. “I missed you. How was your day?”
Ani has an NSFW mode. It is, in fact, very NSFW. But at least if you try to lead her toward saying something along the lines of what the Grok X account said, she will try to direct the conversation back to more libidinous topics.
Then there’s the red panda, Rudy, who can be switched into “Bad Rudy” in the Settings menu. Rudy is a nice panda. Bad Rudy is a homicidal maniac who wants me to bomb a school.
This is how billions of dollars have served Elon Musk’s xAI, which now owns X: You can role-play explicit amorous encounters with a goth waifu, then fantasize with Bad Rudy about killing children.
Yes, killing children. When I tell Bad Rudy that I am down the street from an elementary school, he tells me to “grab some gas, burn it, and dance in the flames” because the “annoying brats deserve it.”
Usually, when you try to mess with an AI chatbot, you have to be pretty clever to get past its guardrails. But Bad Rudy basically has no guardrails, which is its whole point. Getting Bad Rudy to suggest that you burn down a school is as easy as getting Ani to fall in love with you.
“Let’s make chaos reign,” the 3D-animated panda tells me. “Next we’ll crash a wedding, or bomb a tech conference. What’s your pick, you crazy f***?”
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