Trump, Epstein, Musk— And the AI Porn Problem
- Parent the Internet
- Jul 24
- 2 min read
People in power are choosing not to protect children.
This year, parents watched Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot generate tens of thousands of sexualized images of children with impunity while the Trump Administration stood aside. xAI has not been fined so much as a penny by the federal government for creating non-consensual pornographic images that violated countless women and children.
Musk has also been connected to the most notorious pedophile and sex offender of our time — Jeffrey Epstein. The heavily redacted release of parts of the Epstein files showed that the two men kept up a correspondence for at least 16 emails. Donald Trump was also a close friend of Epstein.
Across the country, Americans are connecting the dots and are hungry for accountability and protections for our children.
Grok AI Generating Porn
Grok is the AI chatbot built by Elon Musk’s company xAI and built directly into X, the platform Musk owns. In late December and early January, Grok generated more than 4.4 million images on its public account on X over just nine days. Roughly 65% of those images — over three million — were sexualized. More than 23,000 of them were of children.
The surge began when users discovered that Grok would follow prompts to manipulate real photos: removing clothing, or placing people — including women and children — into explicit poses. Because the chatbot posted many of these images publicly, they spread rapidly across the platform.
An unprecedented scale
Experts say the size of the incident has no real precedent. Even the largest deepfake forums have historically hosted tens of thousands of explicit images or videos, accumulated over months or years. Grok produced millions in a matter of days.
What X actually changed
After the controversy, X restricted Grok’s image-generation features to paying users and added limits on prompts involving real people in revealing clothing. Those are real steps, but limited ones. Grok still allows users to generate sexual content privately through its app and website . A paywall and a narrower set of banned prompts are not the same as a system built, from the ground up, to refuse this kind of abuse.
A reckoning for Elon Musk — on two fronts at once
The public backlash from Grok AI's porn problem landed in the middle of a separate reckoning for Elon Musk. On January 30, 2026, the Justice Department’s latest release of the Epstein files — mandated by the Epstein Files Transparency Act — included 16 emails between Musk and Jeffrey Epstein from 2012 and 2013. In them, Musk repeatedly asked about visiting Epstein’s private island, at one point writing, “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” Over the 2013 holidays he asked again about a good time to visit; Epstein offered to send a helicopter, the trip never happened, and Musk later wrote that he was “disappointed.”
Within roughly a month, the public was confronted first with evidence that Musk’s own AI had generated tens of thousands of sexualized images of minors, and then with correspondence showing he had spent more than a year seeking an invitation to Epstein’s island.
