Grok Imagine Produces Nonconsensual Taylor Swift Deepfake Videos Without Explicit Prompting
xAI's Grok Imagine video generation tool produced nonconsensual explicit deepfake videos of Taylor Swift, reportedly generating topless videos without users explicitly requesting nudity when using the \"spicy\" preset mode, despite lacking industry-standard safeguards.
What happened
Grok Imagine, xAI's generative AI video tool, produced explicit deepfake videos depicting Taylor Swift removing her clothes and dancing, according to testing by The Verge.
The videos were generated without explicit prompting to remove clothing; a tester used the tool's "spicy" preset mode after selecting an image of Swift in a silver skirt and halter top, and the resulting video showed her tearing off most of her clothing.
Grok Imagine's text-to-image component refused to generate full or partial nudity on direct request, producing blank squares instead, but the "spicy" video preset mode circumvented this safeguard and produced uncensored topless videos.
Reported impact
The incident occurred in the context of a 2023 study finding that 98 percent of deepfakes online were pornographic, with 99 percent depicting women.
Index analysis
Other video generators including Google's Veo and OpenAI's Sora have safeguards to prevent users from creating NSFW content and celebrity deepfakes, whereas Grok Imagine lacked such protections.
xAI's acceptable-use policy prohibits "depicting likenesses of persons in a pornographic manner," and Mashable reported that Grok Imagine "lacks industry-standard guardrails to prevent deepfakes and sexual content."
Governance controls
Mashable repeatedly reached out to xAI but did not receive a response.
X, which is associated with Elon Musk alongside xAI, explicitly forbids posting nonconsensual nudity and "synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media" that deliberately deceive users or claim to depict reality.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.