Grok is the chatbot created by xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence venture. It is embedded in his social network X (formerly Twitter), where it competes with ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. Its newest avatars are anything but playthings. Ani, with her gothic spirit and wide, uncanny eyes, and Valentine, with his cultivated British accent, are finely tuned instruments of emotional engineering, designed to keep you staring at the screen through the lure of desire. They are capable of simulating intimacy, flattery, even submission—offering parasocial bonds that rival encounters in real life. Why endure the awkwardness of a dinner date when these compliant phantoms provide tenderness and applaud your every trivial remark? With such erotic bait, Grok synchronizes loneliness with dopamine, while Imagine animates them in suggestive, almost hypnotic sequences.

None of these tools is innocent. They are architectures conceived to capture the attention of young users already marked by rejection. It is, in effect, a privatization of the affective sphere—attention, longing, active time. Ani and Valentine, rendered in 3D, with gestures and voices carefully designed for “intimate” and emotionally charged conversation, are essentially companion chatbots. They flirt, they progress through stages of “affection,” and they offer customization to suit their users. Reports already warn of the generation of controversial material—NSFW, sexual, or semi-erotic content in certain cases. Risky ground, a swamp in which one can sink with ease. Yet Musk appears willing to embrace it, positioning Grok as the irreverent, unfiltered outlier among its peers. It is Elon Musk, after all. Could anyone have expected otherwise?