Elon Musk uses Grok to imagine the possibility of love (techcrunch.com)

After Tesla shareholders approved a compensation package that could be worth $1 trillion, Elon Musk posted two short Grok-generated videos on X. The first, created from his prompt “She smiles and says, ‘I will always love you,’” shows an animated woman on a rainy street speaking in a clearly synthetic voice; 24 minutes later he shared a Grok clip of actress Sydney Sweeney saying “You are so cringe” in a voice that doesn’t sound like her. The posts sparked mockery and debate across X, with many users ridiculing the sentimental clip and others highlighting the awkwardness of AI-generated intimacy. Award-winning author Joyce Carol Oates publicly criticized Musk for never sharing personal, cultural, or aesthetic appreciation, to which Musk replied curtly. For the AI/ML community this is a compact case study in how accessible generative video and synthetic voice tech is changing social signaling and reputational dynamics. Key technical takeaways: text-to-video and text-to-speech can produce emotionally persuasive outputs from simple prompts; celebrity likenesses and convincingly human-tinged audio remain easy to generate, raising consent, deepfake, and copyright concerns. The episode reinforces urgent needs for watermarking, provenance metadata, platform policies, and clearer norms around impersonation and disclosure as generative models move from demos into everyday social use.