Jay Peters
is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
People who pay for access to SuperGrok can now try the AI chatbot’s new “Companions” avatars, xAI owner Elon Musk announced Monday morning. The companions available currently include Ani, an anime avatar, and Rudy, a cartoony red panda.
Ani also has what TestingCatalog describes as an “NSFW” mode where the character wears lingerie. (And just a warning: if you search for posts about the characters on X, you’ll probably come across NSFW videos.)
Right now, users have to go into settings to turn on the companions, but “we will make this easier to turn on in a few days,” Musk says, describing this version as a “soft launch.” Even though I’m a free user of Grok, when I opened the Grok app, I was able to talk to both avatars, so the characters may be more widely available.
Users have found that another AI character called “Chad” is in the works. The app already has a voice mode where you can chat back and forth with a faceless version of Grok, and that has an NSFW toggle.
The addition of the animated characters follows Grok posting antisemitism and Hitler praise last week, which xAI said was due to an “update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot.”
0 Comments
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
Jay Peters
