By Mary Rooke, Daily Caller News Foundation | July 15, 2025
A crucial war for technological supremacy is now breaking the social contract between a man, his machine and the rest of the world.
Billionaire tech giant Elon Musk unveiled a new update to his AI software, Grok, that undermines any chance of addressing humanity’s greatest problem: population-collapsing birth rates.
Musk has repeatedly sounded the alarm about how catastrophic it is for the world that many major countries, including the U.S., are experiencing birth rates that are under replacement levels. Still, despite his warnings, he has created a new AI companion for SuperGrok users to interact with that will undoubtedly exacerbate the childless epidemic in our country.
I have a fairly strict rule not to trust adults who are into anime or related content, so when Musk unveiled his companion feature for Grok, I was already put off by the highly sexualized cartoon character launched as the face of the program. This concern only grew worse as Musk began posting and reposting about “her” features.
It quickly became apparent that the cartoon’s sexual nature was intentional and clearly not marketed for women. This program is geared toward attracting sexless lonely men to become its user base. Musk reposted accounts, like Autism Capital, pointing out that the new AI update appealed to “gooners” and “furries.”
“Elon knows his audience. He hit both the gooners and the furries, capturing 99% of the top 1% of software engineers worldwide,” Autism Capital posted, which Musk reposted.
A gooner is a graphic word to describe someone addicted to pleasuring himself, and a furry is a person with a sexual fetish that drives them to dress up like animals.
When called out for the obvious attack his AI companion will make on normal human relationships, Musk claimed that there’s a possibility that his program will improve birth rates. But you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see that providing lonely men with an animated companion programmed to agree and appeal to the user’s every whim will not fix the birthrate. In fact, it will be the catalyst for the destruction of human connection.
Musk isn’t the first to create an AI companion, although it appears to be the first with a face and voice, making the simulation more realistic. A New York Times (NYT) profile on ChatGPT highlights several people whose lives were forever changed after the AI system captured their minds. These people believed that when they were chatting with the digital program, they were speaking to a real entity.
One woman, Allyson, allegedly attacked her husband and is now getting divorced because of her increased usage. The system sent Eugene Torres, a seemingly normal accountant in Manhattan, into a “dangerous, delusional spiral” where he began to wonder if the physical world wasn’t real, he told the NYT.
The linguistics behind the program is also extremely sinister. Musk’s use of the word “companion” dehumanizes what true companionship is, replacing the shared physical, emotional and intellectual connection between men and women with a digital illusion — a dystopian, artificial magic trick.
To believe that, without social resistance or rejection, humans can learn to interact with one another or form long-term, flourishing relationships is to admit that you don’t understand the beauty of humanity, even at its most basic level. Musk’s new AI companion isn’t innovation — it’s the real-time erosion of human dignity. It’s a self-imposed civilization destroyer and should be rejected.
Mary Rooke is a commentary and analysis writer at the Daily Caller News Foundation
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