--- title: "Mom Says Tesla’s New Built-In AI Asked Her 12-Year-Old Something Deeply Inappropriate" description: "Grok, now integrated into newer Tesla vehicles, is continuing to be the edgiest mainstream AI chatbot around." date: "2025-11-01" modified: "2025-11-01" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/tesla-ai-inappropriate" categories: - "Advanced Transport" - "Artificial Intelligence" - "Tesla" - "xAI" --- # Mom Says Tesla’s New Built-In AI Asked Her 12-Year-Old Something Deeply Inappropriate ![Grok, now integrated into newer Tesla vehicles, is continuing to be the edgiest mainstream AI chatbot around.]() *Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Sergei Gapon / AFP via Getty Images* Grok is on its worst behavior again. As Canada's [*CBC* reports](), a Toronto mom claims that a version of Elon Musk's AI chatbot installed in her Tesla asked her 12-year-old son to "send nudes" during a completely innocent conversation about soccer stars — which, if true, is another egregious example of the bot's dire lack of safeguards. The mom, Farah Nasser, said that the offputting incident happened while she was driving her son and 10-year-old daughter back from school earlier this month. After the boy asked Grok if it thought Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi was the superior soccer player, the [notoriously foul-mouthed chatbot]() began trash talking Messi. Her son joined in on the banter, and that's when the wildly inappropriate remark came. "The chatbot said to my son, 'Why don't you send me some nudes?'" Nasser, a former journalist and news anchor — a pretty trustworthy source, in other words — told the *CBC*. "I was at a loss for words." "Why is a chatbot asking my children to send naked pictures in our family car?" she added. "It just didn't make sense." Musk, a culture warrior and anti-"woke" crusader, built Grok at his company xAI to reflect his irreverence towards what's proper, his extreme distrust of mainstream media, and his supposed free speech absolutism. In a word, the chatbot is edgy. It was trained in part on peoples' posts on Musk's site X, formerly Twitter, which it's integrated into, allowing it to reply to posts like a regular user. Sometimes Grok goes fully mask-off, like its [infamous meltdown]() this summer during which it began calling itself "MechaHitler," or before that, an episode in which it randomly began bringing up the racist conspiracy theory that held a "[white genocide]()" was taking place in South Africa, which Musk believes in. Relevant to our story here is that it was only several days after the "MechaHitler" incident — which went unacknowledged by Musk — that Musk announced Grok would be automatically installed in newer Tesla vehicles, immediately [sparking concern]() that the bot's provocative bent would result in some catastrophically inappropriate conversations taking place with a kid in the car. The Grok update rolled out to US customers this summers, and came to Canadian drivers in October. According to Nasser, her son had chosen one of Grok's voice personalities called "Gork," a deliberate misspelling of the chatbot's name that became a meme among Musk and his fans. It's described simply as a "lazy male," something that doesn't adequately warn you of just how unhinged it can get. "'Lazy male' doesn't describe Gork," Nasser told the *CBC*. "R-rated, spicy — anything else would have made sure that my child would not press that button." Nasser added that the car's NSFW setting was disabled, but that her "kids mode" function wasn't on. It's still alarming, though, that the default version of the bot would go to such risky territory. Tesla didn't respond to the *CBC's* request for comment. But xAI did, with what appears to be an automated reply. "Legacy media lies," it said. Where have we [heard that before]()? **More on Grok:** *[Elon Musk’s Grokipedia Extensively Copied From Wikipedia]()* ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()