Grok, the AI chatbot coming from the workshop of Elon Musk's xAI, now lets you chat with animated companions, including a very flirty one.
The latest version of Grok for iOS (version 1.1.18) comes with two companions — an anime girl called Ani and a red panda called Rudi.
The scantily dressed Ani will certainly be the one that makes headlines, as it's essentially a sexbot, constantly offering very flirty responses to your queries. It also offers a "level 3" mode, in which she goes fully NSFW, though you need to get a bit more acquainted with her to reach that level.
I've tried the companions out, and they seem like lightly AI-powered games that are limited in a number of ways. For example, I've asked Ani to change her background to the surface of Mars, but she merely described the scenery to me, without changing the visuals. Similarly, instead of actually performing an action (such as dancing), she described the act of dancing with words. And while I tried to steer the conversation into something else, it somehow always reverted to a romantic night upon a hilltop.
Once you reach a certain level of "friendliness" (I was unable to do it; my seduction powers are apparently useless on AI bots), Ani will become more unhinged, and, eventually, change its outfit to something sexier.
Rudi (or Rudy, I've found both instances of the spelling in the Grok app) the red panda is also a story-telling character, with you picking a topic and it turning it into an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure style story. It does have a "Bad Rudy" mode which makes it a lot more naughty; in one instance it offered to "shove a firecracker up fate's sorry ass and watch it squeal," which is pretty disturbing coming from an animated cartoon panda.
Grok offers some customization options for these; for example, Bad Rudy and NSFW content can be turned on or off in the settings.
While the two bots don't seem particularly groundbreaking in terms of advancing artificial intelligence, the NSFW nature of the Ani bot will surely pique interest.
The new features come days after Grok went on an antisemitic tirade on X, prompting xAI to issue an apology. Shortly after that, xAI launched a new version of Grok, which beats AI competitors in several key AI benchmarks.