X Adds New ‘Gork’ Voice to Voice Mode

I’m so glad that comedy is legal again on X.

This is probably not a news story, as such, but it’s a new functionality within an app tangentially connected to X, so it qualifies.

Last month, X owner Elon Musk, while attempting to summon his Grok chatbot within a post stream for a fact-check, accidentally typed in “@gork” instead of “@grok.”

That error has now spawned its own profile (@gork), which is seemingly a more slow-witted version of Grok (and may or may not be run by Elon Musk himself).

Elon also changed his display name to “Gorklon Rust,” while X has also added Gork as a new voice within Grok’s voice mode options.

As you can see in this example, shared by app research Radu Oncescu, Gork is a “lazy male voice.”

So, hilarious, right? A simple spelling error that’s now spawned its own personality, with Gork taking a more Neanderthal approach to queries.

Which is pretty much in line with Elon’s own more collegiate sense of humor, while researchers have also found that X’s Grok chatbot will also convert images of women into “less-clothed” versions, another seemingly acceptable use of the X’s AI tools.

As reported by PC Mag:  

“While the chatbot rejects prompts for completely nude images, it does fulfill ‘remove her clothes’ requests with AI-generated images of women in bikinis or lingerie. Grok's responses are public and appear as replies to the original prompts.”

That feels less than legal, or less than ethical. But again, it does also align with Musk’s own less-PC approach to content, which is also part of his broader free speech push within the app.

I don’t know, it feels like a minor story, as noted, but it also feels like it represents something more about Elon’s X project, in symbolic terms.

But then again, when this is what Elon Musk considers comedy:

I guess it all makes sense. And people can choose to participate or not.