Elon Musk’s Grok video on ‘love’ sparks mockery and a literary takedown

Elon Musk’s latest experiment with his AI video tool Grok Imagine has turned into a social media spectacle. After Tesla shareholders approved a new compensation deal reportedly worth around $1 trillion, Musk appeared to celebrate the milestone with a late-night post on X.

At 4:20 a.m. EST, Musk shared a video generated using Grok Imagine, his company xAI’s new photo and video creation tool. He described the prompt as, “She smiles and says, ‘I will always love you.’” The video shows an animated woman standing in the rain, repeating those words in a clearly synthetic voice.

Minutes later, Musk posted another clip — this time featuring a Grok-generated version of actress Sydney Sweeney saying, “You are so cringe.” The clips quickly went viral, not for their technical achievement but for how unsettlingly personal they seemed. Many users mocked the posts, calling the “always love you” video “the most divorced post of all time” and “the saddest post in the history of this website.”

But the sharpest reaction came from 87-year-old author Joyce Carol Oates. In a reply to a separate thread where Musk defended his massive pay package against criticism from a Texas state senator, Oates questioned Musk’s worldview, saying it was “curious” that he never shared anything about “friends, relatives, nature, pets, movies, music, or books.” She went on to describe him as “totally uneducated, uncultured,” suggesting that even the poorest users on X may “have access to more beauty and meaning in life” than Musk himself.