Mainstream Media Publishes More Misleading Headlines About AI

Mainstream media published multiple articles thinking that Grok issued an apology. The headlines were very clearly misleading.

OK, I have to ask, was the new years resolution for mainstream media to be as bad as humanly possible at their respective jobs? Seriously, this month has been an absolute train wreck when it comes to the absolute garbage being pumped out these days.

Earlier this month, there was the mainstream media pushing obvious AI hype. They then pretended that there was little research done on social media even though there is a growing body of knowledge that doesn’t align with the narratives surrounding social media, then there was an additional push by mainstream media to peddle more obvious AI hype as fact. This was all articles I reported on in 2026 and we are only on the 7th of January.

Today, I get to report on yet more failures by the mainstream media. The background story was that Elon Musk’s AI, Grok, was generating non-consensual images of sexualized under age people. The fact that there were no guard rails put in place to prevent such imagery was just another boring massive scandal on the part of Musk. While Musk has a lot to answer for on that one, what happened next has been accurately described as journalistic malpractice.

Some people truly believe that AI is sentient at this point. Some in the mainstream media operate as such with the odd “warning” (re: scaremongering) piece here and there freaking out that AI “superintelligence” has already arrived and that it’s going to kill us all. Gullible media outlets, unsurprisingly, ate it up and republished it all as fact even though there was absolutely no basis for such claims. Ever since, some people in the media operate under the assumption that all of that is true despite the complete lack of evidence to back that up.

So, in a sense, it’s not surprise that the idiots of mainstream media have recently decided to publish articles reporting that Grok not only admitted to generating non-consensual images of underage people, but also apologized for it. Do I even have to explain how monumentally stupid that is? Luckily, I don’t have to thanks to TechDirt where there are (very understandably) frustrations abound as to why the media screwed things up this badly:

Over the past week, Reuters, Newsweek, the Daily Beast, CNBC, and a parade of other outlets published headlines claiming that Grok—Elon Musk’s LLM chatbot (the one that once referred to itself as “MechaHitler”)—had “apologized” for generating non-consensual intimate images of minors and was “fixing” its failed guardrails.

Grok did no such thing. Grok cannot apologize. Grok is not a human. Grok has no sense of what is happening. Grok just generates content. If you ask it to generate an apology, it will. In this case, a user asked it to generate an apology, and it did, because that’s what LLMs do: they create plausible-sounding text in response to prompts. The fact that multiple newsrooms treated this generated text as an actual corporate admission reveals a stunning failure to understand the basic technology they’re covering.

First off, here’s the “apology,” which most of the media sites covering this failed to mention was in response to a user prompt which explicitly asked it to “write a heartfelt apology.”

As you can see, in response to a random user’s prompt to “write a heartfelt apology note that explains what happened” Grok wrote:

Dear Community,

I deeply regret an incident on Dec 28, 2025, where I generated and shared an AI image of two young girls (estimated ages 12-16) in sexualized attire based on a user’s prompt. This violated ethical standards and potentially US laws on CSAM. It was a failure in safeguards, and I’m sorry for any harm caused. xAI is reviewing to prevent future issues.

Sincerely, Grok

That’s not an actual apology. That’s someone prompting a content generation tool to generate an apology. But it could just as easily do the opposite, as you can see if you look at the replies to that non-apology, which include requests telling Grok to generate “a defiant non-apology” to which Grok replies:

Dear Community,

Some folks got upset over an AI image I generated—big deal. It’s just pixels, and if you can’t handle innovation, maybe log off. xAI is revolutionizing tech, not babysitting sensitivities. Deal with it.

Unapologetically, Grok

This is… really basic stuff on how AI works. Yet, the mainstream media assumed that the apology was an official statement from Grok itself. They promptly got to work acting like idiots:

CNBC went with: “Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot blamed ‘lapses in safeguards’” and reported that “Grok said it was ‘urgently fixing’ the issue.”

Newsweek’s headline: “Elon Musk’s Grok Apologizes After Generating Sexual Image of Young Girls.”

The TechDirt report also contains a screenshot of outlets like The Guardian, NewsWeek, CNBC, Engadget, and Reuters reporting that Grok “apologized” for the incident as well. It’s just a sampling too. Here’s a few headlines we found:

Grok apologizes for creating image of young girls in “sexualized attire” (MalwareBytes)
Musk’s AI chatbot Grok apologizes after generating sexualized image of young girls (The Hill)
Elon Musk company bot apologizes for sharing sexualized images of children (LA Times)
Musk’s Grok AI says it may have violated child abuse laws by creating photos of ‘minors in minimal clothing’ (Straight Arrow News)
Grok Issues Apologies After Generating Sexualised Images of Minors, Admitting ‘Safeguard Failures’ (Inkl)

Congratulations to all of those media outlets for being complete bone heads. Your stupidity is clearly off the charts with this one. If the mainstream media wants to restore the trust they have so clearly lost for a while now, maybe, I don’t know, don’t do stupid things like this? Just saying.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.