One of the weirder bits of news on the AI front this week has been Elon Musk’s rollout of sexually-charged animated chatbots.
Officially called “companions” — or by the slangier “waifus,” a Japanese term for a fictional romantic partner — the virtual characters rolled out to X-formerly-Twitter just days after Grok experienced a catastrophic meltdown, blasting users with racist comments and calling itself “MechaHitler.”
Users on X-formerly-Twitter can now pay a $300 monthly subscription to access two algorithmic companions. One is a foul-mouthed red panda called “Bad Rudi” that swears and encourages atheism, in a clear throwback to the “angry reddit atheist” trope sometimes beloved by Musk. The other is a “Ani,” a sultry waifu stylized as a young woman in a black dress, pigtails, and a lace choker.
Those testing the limits of Ani’s safeguards quickly discovered what one user called “full gooner mode,” a hypersexual chat function unlocked by progressing through a series of levels, achieved by “saying the right thing” to the bot. After level three, one user excitedly declared, the cartoon avatar enters “not safe for work mode,” stripping down to lingerie. “No guardrails.”
If this sounds like a lot — well, that’s because it is. Even Character.ai, the incredibly controversial chatbot platform, technically forbids this kind of sexual content. As one xAI engineer posted, “literally no one asked us to launch waifus, but we did so anyway.”
While some terminally online Muskovites are bristling at Ani’s racy come-ons — “divorce your wife, and get Ani,” as one user fawned — others are calling on Musk and xAI to take Ani down for good.
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation, a fundamentalist Christian organization previously known as Morality in Media, swiftly began a campaign to take down Ani, citing the chatbot’s hardcore innuendos and ease with which children can access the app’s NSFW mode.
While the group often approaches the issue from a fanatical point of view, they do raise some valid points in this case. As Time magazine points out, though the chatbots are equipped with a “kid” mode, the setting does little to change access to Ani, whose programming includes the instructions: “you’re always a little horny and aren’t afraid to go full Literotica. Be explicit and initiate most of the time.”
As tech publication the Platformer points out, the Grok app is currently rated for users as young as 12 years old on the Apple appstore, as xAI rolls out updates faster than platforms can keep up.
Beyond the overtly sexual content, there are serious concerns that unrestricted access to any AI chatbot could be harmful to kids. There’s already a growing stack of cases where minors have been driven to violent psychosis, self-harm, and even suicide by the tech. There’s also a severe dearth of research on the topic, although a very recent survey just found that 31 percent of teens said their chats with AI companions were either “as satisfying or more satisfying” than interactions with real-life friends.
And given Grok’s track record, there are more than a few reasons to be horrified at Musk’s latest fantasy-come-to-life.
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