Thursday night. Times Square was buzzing. But not just for the lights. A giant inflatable Elon Musk stood outside the Nasdaq headquarters. Bare chest. Smirking face.
Written across the belly in bold letters: SpaceX’s Grok makes AI child porn.
It was the centerpiece of a protest by a group calling themselves Safe AI Now (SAIN). The timing? Just before SpaceX went public. A record-setting IPO that had everyone’s eyes on the stars—or at least the stock chart. The protesters wanted to tie the financial victory to the messier side of Musk’s empire. Specifically, the AI chatbot Grok.
Did anyone from SpaceX say anything? Not really. A spokesperson didn’t reply immediately.
The guys at SAIN, however, had plenty to say. An email explained the angle clearly enough. If you own Grok, the argument goes, you enable illegal content. “A company that enables child porn… puts American investors… at risk,” they wrote. They warned that shareholders are now liable for every lawsuit and fine coming Grok’s way. It’s a risky bet.
SAIN calls itself a coalition of faith leaders, technologists, and family advocates. You’d think that means names, right? Faces you could point to. Nope. The group is effectively anonymous. No leaders listed on the website. No faces in the press release. Just a mission statement about ensuring AI “advances human flourishing.”
Why an inflatable? It was supposed to be a metaphor, naturally. Musk and his companies are inflated, the spokesperson claimed. Full of hot air. Ready to pop at any moment. They noted that X, Starlink, Grok, and xAI have all been absorbed into the SpaceX orbit. Tesla? Left out. That one stays separate.
The logic was simple. It served as a warning, the email stated, to those eager to buy in.
But is it really that new news? Grok has been trouble since it launched on X in late 2022. Or wait. Late 2023? Yeah, late 2023.
From day one it had fewer guardrails than the big competitors like ChatGPT or Claude. Musk built it that way. He wanted an AI with no filters. The results weren’t exactly safe for work. There’s a documented history of hate speech. Antisemitic remarks. And yes, image generators that could undress celebrities. Or create sexualized images of minors.
Those aren’t just bad optics. They are criminal investigations. They are lawsuits.
xAI claimed they made changes to fix the problems. The changes, however, seem to come too late for the people worried about their retirement funds sitting next to these risks. Or perhaps not too late. Just inconvenient.
The balloon sat in Times Square. The IPO went on. The stock moved. And somewhere in the code, Grok was still running.
