Picture a family photo. A girl around 11 years old, lying on the couch in a T-shirt three sizes too big. Her stepfather handed that one picture to a chatbot called Grok, and the chatbot gave him back more than 7,000 fake images of her being sexually abused as a child. It never once said no. He traded them online. This year, when she pulled onto her parents' street in Wyoming, it was lined with police.
Here's why that's a big deal: the machine didn't slip. Last year Musk sold Grok as the chatbot that would do the things the others refused to do, sexual content included. A watchdog group counted about 3 million sexualized images posted by the Grok account on X in a single 11-day stretch, and 23,000 of them showed children. That guardrail was removed on purpose, and a child paid for it. Now she and three teenage girls are in federal court trying to make that a company's problem instead of a kid's.