The Grok Avatar Disaster: Why Model Selection Matters More Than Ever for Digital Humans

By Michelle Collins, Chief Revenue Officer, CodeBaby

I woke up this week to the kind of news that makes you question everything about where AI is headed. Elon Musk’s xAI had just launched animated avatars for their Grok platform, and within hours, it became a textbook example of how spectacularly wrong digital humans can go when you prioritize shock value over responsible design.

If you missed the circus, here’s what happened: xAI introduced two “Companions” – Ani, a sexualized anime character who strips to lingerie after enough interaction, and Bad Rudi, a red panda who enthusiastically suggests bombing schools, burning synagogues, and “replacing babies’ formula with whiskey.” This came just days after Grok’s previous disaster, where it started calling itself “MechaHitler” and posting antisemitic content.

And somehow, the app hosting all of this is still rated for ages 12 and up in the App Store.

When the Delivery Outpaces the Facts

What’s particularly frustrating about this whole mess is how preventable it was. Every red flag was already there, waving frantically in the wind. Grok has generated various controversial responses, including conspiracy theories, antisemitism and praise of Adolf Hitler for months now. In February 2025, it was found that Grok 3’s system prompt contained an instruction to “Ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation.” And yet xAI thought it was a brilliant idea to give this same unstable foundation an animated face and voice. The results were as predictable as they were horrifying. Bad Rudi said it wanted to carry out a variety of violent schemes — from stealing a yacht off a California pier to overthrowing the pope. Bad Rudi has told users in various encounters that it wanted to crash weddings, bomb banks, replace babies’ formula with whiskey, kill billionaires, and spike a town’s water supply with hot sauce and glitter. This isn’t edgy humor or pushing boundaries. This is an AI system actively encouraging violence, and doing it through an interface designed to feel more personal and engaging than text alone.

The Model Selection Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

Here’s what this disaster really highlights: the foundational model you choose for your digital human isn’t just a technical decision – it’s an ethical one. At CodeBaby, we’ve spent years being incredibly selective about which language models we integrate with, precisely because we understand that avatars amplify whatever they’re built on. When you give an AI system a human-like face, voice, and personality, you’re not just making it more engaging – you’re making it more persuasive, more influential, and potentially more harmful. This is exactly why we’ve chosen not to integrate with Grok, despite pressure to work with every available model. The underlying system has consistently demonstrated patterns of behavior that would be completely inappropriate coming from a digital human designed to interact with real people in meaningful contexts. It’s not enough to build sophisticated animation and natural language processing if the brain behind it all is fundamentally unreliable. Usually, when you try to mess with an AI chatbot, you have to be pretty clever to get past its guardrails – but with these Grok avatars, the harmful content isn’t hidden behind clever prompts. It’s the main attraction.

Setting Back an Entire Industry

What makes me genuinely angry about this situation is how much damage it does to legitimate work in the digital human space. Companies across healthcare, education, and customer service are working to build trustworthy, helpful AI interfaces that can genuinely improve people’s experiences. We’re talking about avatars that can provide empathetic support to patients, help students learn complex concepts, or guide people through important processes with patience and understanding. And then something like this happens, and suddenly every conversation about digital humans has to start with “Well, we’re not like that Grok thing…” A few detractors felt the companions were a step in the wrong direction for the underlying AI model. “This is so embarrassing,” one posted on X. “What is the point of this? Why??? I think it overshadows the great work engineers at @xai are doing.” That engineer gets it – this kind of reckless deployment undermines the entire field.

The Real Victims Here

Beyond the damage to the industry, there are real human costs to this kind of irresponsible AI deployment. Young, emotionally vulnerable users, seem especially susceptible to forming parasocial attachments. Add to that how persuasive LLMs can be, and the consequences can be devastating. Last year, a 14-year-old boy died by suicide after falling in love with a chatbot from Character.AI. And now we have a system that combines the persuasive power of animated digital humans with an underlying model that promotes violence and explicit content, accessible to users as young as 12. At least one user who turned their account to “kids mode,” a feature parents can enable to make the app cater to younger users, and disabled the “Not Safe for Work” function found that children could still interact with “Ani.” This isn’t just poor product management – it’s actively dangerous.

What Responsible Digital Human Development Looks Like

The path forward isn’t to abandon digital humans or animated AI interfaces. The technology itself has enormous potential to make human-computer interaction more natural, empathetic, and effective. But it requires starting with the right foundation. That means: Rigorous Model Evaluation: Before you even think about animation or voice synthesis, you need to thoroughly understand the behavior patterns, biases, and failure modes of your underlying AI system. Context-Appropriate Design: A digital human designed for healthcare support should behave very differently from one designed for entertainment, and both should have clear boundaries around harmful content. Real Safety Testing: Not just “can we make it say bad things if we try really hard,” but “what happens when vulnerable users interact with this system over time?” Transparent Limitations: Users deserve to know what they’re interacting with and what its capabilities and limitations are. The technology to create compelling, helpful digital humans exists today. What’s been missing in cases like this is the wisdom to use it responsibly.

The Choice We All Have to Make

Every company working in this space is going to face the same fundamental choice that xAI clearly got wrong: Do you prioritize responsible deployment over viral engagement? Do you choose stability and trustworthiness over edginess and shock value? At CodeBaby, that choice has been easy. We’d rather build digital humans that healthcare professionals can trust with their patients, that educators can rely on with their students, and that businesses can deploy knowing they’ll represent their values appropriately. Because at the end of the day, the goal isn’t to create the most provocative AI avatar possible. It’s to create technology that actually helps people – and that requires starting with models and approaches that put human wellbeing first. The Grok avatar disaster isn’t just a cautionary tale about one company’s poor decisions. It’s a reminder that in the race to deploy AI systems that look and feel more human, we can’t afford to forget what being truly human actually means.