- Another AI companion is coming to Elon Musk's Grok chatbot.
- The companion is inspired by "Twilight" and "50 Shades of Grey," Musk said.
- Grok already has two companions: an anime girl named Ani and a vulgar red panda named Rudi.
Elon Musk says his Grok chatbot is getting a male companion — and his company looked to two popular romance novels for inspiration.
Musk on Wednesday teased a forthcoming male Grok companion, asking users for their thoughts on what he should be named.
"His personality is inspired by Edward Cullen from Twilight and Christian Grey from 50 Shades," Musk wrote.
When an X user commented that the character should have been inspired by Mr. Darcy, a character from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Musk replied, "We will, of course, have another character inspired by Mr. Darcy."
Grok has already released two AI companions: a flirty female anime character named Ani and a vulgar red panda named Rudi.
A representative for xAI didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Grok was recently criticized for a series of antisemitic posts, including some in which it referred to itself as "MechaHitler," a video game version of Hitler. xAI later apologized for the chatbot's "horrific behavior."
"Deprecated code made @grok susceptible to existing user posts; including when such posts contained extremist views," xAI said.
xAI isn't the only company to experiment with offering various chatbot personas. There's Character.AI, which says it lets users choose from millions of AI characters as conversation partners. Meta started offering chatbot characters featuring the likenesses of celebrities like Snoop Dogg, Kendall Jenner, and Charli D'Amelio, but scrapped them after less than a year.
Time will tell if Grok's companions meet a similar fate.
