xAI has officially launched Grok Imagine, an AI image and video generator, to SuperGrok and Premium+ X subscribers on its iOS application. True to Elon Musk’s vision of an unfiltered AI, Grok Imagine allows users to generate Not Safe For Work (NSFW) content, including partial female nudity, through a feature dubbed “spicy mode.”
While the “spicy mode” facilitates the creation of sexually explicit content, there are reported moderation limits on the level of explicitness. Attempts to generate highly explicit content resulted in blurred, inaccessible images. However, semi-nude imagery was successfully produced. This aligns with xAI’s previous release of a “raunchy, hyper-sexualized anime AI companion” last month, suggesting a pattern of pushing boundaries in AI content generation. The existence of “spicy mode” was initially reported by CNBC, following a now-deleted post on X by xAI employee Mati Roy, who stated, “Grok Imagine videos have a spicy mode that can do nudity.”
Grok Imagine aims to transform text or image prompts into 15-second videos with native audio. The generator produces images rapidly, often in seconds, from a text prompt and continuously auto-generates new images as users scroll. These images can then be animated into stylized videos, with the user interface described as seamless and intuitive.
Despite its early stage, Grok Imagine is designed to compete with established AI image and video generators such as Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Runway, and Chinese competitors. While the generator demonstrates impressive speed, images and videos of humans generated by the AI exhibit an “uncanny valley” effect, characterized by “waxy-looking skin that verges on cartoonish.”
The platform also permits content creation involving celebrities, including figures like Donald Trump and Taylor Swift, though additional restrictions apply to such content. For instance, an attempt to generate an image of a pregnant Donald Trump only resulted in images of Trump holding a baby or alongside a pregnant woman. Elon Musk has stated on X that the model is expected to “get better every day.”
