Giant inflatable of Elon Musk appears in Times Square to protest Grok’s role in generating CSAM
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A giant inflatable depicting Elon Musk has appeared in New York City’s Times Square, drawing attention to allegations that his AI chatbot Grok has been used to generate child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
The shirtless, tattooed inflatable bust appeared on Thursday morning, the day before Musk’s space company SpaceX was due to make its stock market debut on the Nasdaq.
It showed Musk with a heart tattoo reading “ketamine,” a reference to his acknowledged drug use, alongside the printed phrase “SpaceX’s Grok makes AI child porn.” Barricades around it repeated the message and carried the hashtag #StopSpaceXChildNudes.
The protest refers to Grok, the chatbot made by Musk’s AI firm xAI, which has been at the centre of mounting legal action over sexualised images of real people, including children.
This week, prosecutors in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, charged a 66-year-old man with creating CSAM using Grok, after X flagged 37 images he allegedly uploaded or shared through the chatbot in April.
In March, three teenage girls filed a class-action lawsuit against xAI in California, alleging Grok was used to generate sexually explicit images of them as minors. The suit accuses the company of “knowingly” participating in the production and distribution of CSAM and failing to use “industry standard methods of safeguarding” against it. xAI has not publicly responded to the lawsuit’s central claims.
X said it limited Grok’s ability to create sexualised images of real people in January, after such images flooded the platform, though a Common Sense Media assessment found those restrictions easy to bypass.
Musk has not commented on the inflatable as of June 12.
