Elon Musk uses Grok to imagine the possibility of love

After Tesla shareholders approved a new compensation package that could be worth $1 trillion, CEO Elon Musk appears to be celebrating with a normal weekend on his social media platform X.

In an early Saturday morning post with the surely coincidental timestamp of 4:20am EST, Musk posted a video generated by Grok Imagine, the new photo and video tool from his company xAI. 

As Musk described it, the video was generated by his prompt, “She smiles and says, ‘I will always love you.’” And the video does, in fact, show an animated woman on a rainy street, saying those words in an obviously synthetic voice.

Twenty-four minutes later, Musk posted a Grok-generated video of the actress Sydney Sweeney saying, in a distinctly un-Sydney-Sweeney-like voice, “You are so cringe.”

While it’s increasingly common to see people being weird about AI-generated women and even forming romantic relationships with chatbots, many X users pounced on the “always love you” video in particular, with one describing it as “the most divorced post of all time” and another calling it “the saddest post in the history of this website.”

Remarkably, neither of those was the most stinging critique of Musk posted to X this weekend. Instead, the prize goes to 87-year-old, award-winning author Joyce Carol Oates.

Responding to an impressively labyrinthine series of posts in which one user approvingly quoted Musk firing back at a Texas state senator who criticized his compensation package, Oates wrote that it’s “so curious” that Musk “never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates,” whether that’s posting about friends, relatives, nature, pets, movies, music, or books.

“In fact he seems totally uneducated, uncultured,” she wrote. “The poorest persons on Twitter may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the ‘most wealthy person in the world.’”

To which Musk simply responded, “Oates is a liar and delights in being mean. Not a good human.”