u/Unlikely_Engineer_51

Me, using the image edit function, trying to compose actual scenes to make videos with consistent characters and locations, using multiple reference images.

Me:

>Put character from reference sheet @1 into scene/location @2.

Grok:

>Here. I copy-pasted the character into the scene. Anything else?

Me:

>No! That's... not what I wanted. I want you to fully integrate the character into the scene, in a specific pose. Also adjust the lighting and everything.

Grok:

>Here. I created a completely new character, and put it into the scene you wanted.

Me:

>What? Who is that? That's not my character. And why does it look so... fake and CGI-like?

Me trying again 10 times, always getting the same character, but not the one from my reference image/s, no matter how I prompt.

Grok:

>It looks vaguely similar. It's one of our average-looking stock characters for easy re-use. Is that not enough?

Me:

>No, it's not. Now, take that image, and make the character look exactly like in the reference image @1.

Grok:

>Ok. Here is another version of our stock character, but I tagged it as a celebrity now, so it will be highly moderated.

Me:

>What? Why?

Grok:

>You asked me to make the character look like someone specific. You are clearly trying to create a deep fake of a real person.

Me:

>Wtf? Why do you have to be like this???

Note: The only parody is that Grok Imagine doesn't talk back like this.

I'm a SuperGrok Heavy user. Already cancelled after their Image 2.0 release, but subscription is still running until the start of September.

For the last 1-2 weeks, something happened that has never happened before: I had problems even remotely reaching my weekly limits. Even with their deteriorating service, and ever increasing restrictions, I always had creative ideas for interesting projects, and was getting value out of it, though I've been constantly criticizing xAI for every bad decision.

Now, with the release of Image 2.0, the decrease in quality and capability of their text-to-image and, more importantly, image-to-image, it has become so bad, that it became almost unusable for me. It is so inferior to the previous quality model that it breaks my heart that they're simply taking a great tool from us, and feeding us with cheap AI slop, while selling it as "progress". All on top of the ridiculous increase in moderation which is an ongoing theme for all of 2026, which will probably lead to fully sanitized and SFW content until the end of the year.

They already put a halt to all of my ongoing projects with their Imagine 1.5 releases for video and references-to-video (though it isn't all bad), because they suddenly changed all the voices of the characters in my AI movies. Yes, you can now use "voice references", but only for their small selection of stock voices. Great. Doesn't help. Heavy moderation is making everything difficult and frustrating, even when you know how to prompt around it.

They have deteriorated the product so much, and sucked out all the fun from it, that I hardly feel the need to use it anymore, and every idea I have immediately hits a wall. And, you never know if something you can do today, still works tomorrow. I've also been dabbling a lot with local generative AI (Krea 2 + MiniMax H3), which is much more interesting right now to me, and creates astonishing results. It's already very usable, but I'm seriously thinking about beefing up my hardware, despite the steep prices.

So, yesterday I still had 40% of my weekly limit left (think ~4 SuperGrok weekly limits), just hours before my reset. Since I don't want to give them a free pass, and don't want to waste anything, I took a single prompt, and created 20 videos to fill my limit. 20? Yes, it was a slightly "spicy" prompt that caused 10-20% moderation only 1-2 weeks before. Now, it was moderated over 90% of the time. And the results? All of them were the most boring interpretations of the prompt you could think of. On top of really bad "AI physics" and obvious attempts to make the video less "spicy".

They are actively fighting creativity and fun, and are turning everything into sanitized, corporate-safe AI slop that doesn't offend anyone. I don't care anymore. It's time to move on. Grok Imagine has finally managed... to simply bore me.

I was reading a lot about people getting moderated to hell after the Imagine 2.0 release. I was not affected, but I still believed them (there are many people around here that don't). Turns out, I was just being lucky for a little while longer. I changed my VPN server, and suddenly I'm also getting moderated to hell. Changed it back, still everything gets moderated. No matter which country I choose, or if I disable it. I'm not even mad, since the new model only spits out generic garbage anyway.

I just cancelled my SuperGrok Heavy subscription. This is the last straw.

It looks like they re-trained or re-calibrated their image model without any adult content, or built-in some major biases into the model. Now, it can still do decent faces, but it completely sucks at creating human bodies. Now, every single body looks the same:

• Same generic shapes, as if they only trained it with a few generic stock images. No variations.
• Fake, plastic look. No detailed skin textures. No realism. Full AI slop look.
• Even using detailed reference pictures produces the same kind of "stock bodies" that look like nothing like in the source images.

Wow, this is just utter garbage. If they don't fix this, their text-to-image and image-to-image models are dead. I can't work with it. I am baffled how bad it is. How bad can you actually make your product?

Is anybody experiencing the same?

Edit: After changing my VPN server around, suddenly everything gets moderated, no matter which country I choose. I'm not even mad, since the resulting pictures are garbage anyway. But, I think it's time to finally quit.

I don't get it. What's the NSFW tag for on r/grok? If I add a single image that is even remotely "NSFW", and I mean something extremely tame, that doesn't really show anything at all (e.g. implied nudity), it gets removed instantly by Reddit's filters.

The rules state "No overly NSFW content", followed by "Pretty self explanatory. Mark it as NSFW." No, it's not self explanatory. I post something that is not "overly NSFW", mark it as NSFW, and it gets removed. So, what's the issue? Is the tag merely for talking about NSFW content?

xAI Safety Engineer:

>"Yes, it's true. We've trained our moderation models extensively, and we added even more layers of moderation, each of them taking up some cost of the total computation. Our prompt analysis model alone can now analyze millions of hypothetical scenarios to determine if any naughty bits might come into view within a scene, or if anything spicy could happen. We're adding more moderation rules by each day. This saves computation to allow more moderation. Our teams are scouring the internet and infiltrate online communities to detect any secret workarounds that are never publicly shared otherwise, to initiate extensive counter-measures against those pesky gooners."

Interviewer:

>"That sounds... uhm... impressive? But, ... why?"

xAI Safety Engineer:

>"Have you ever seen uncovered human anatomy? It's disgusting and traumatizing! Don't those purely fictional characters deserve human rights, too? Not to be exposed or do anything against their will?"

Interviewer:

>"What? Uhm... ok. What about having the least censored AI, or the R-rated standard?"

xAI Safety Engineer:

>"What are you talking about? No other AI company allows the artistic display of female upper body anatomy like we do. And who says that R-rated movies shouldn't be safe to watch for children?"

Interviewer:

>"I don't think that children should watch... uhm... never mind. Doesn't this make everything even more expensive? How can you afford all of this?"

xAI Safety Engineer:

>"Of course, we had to make compromises, and we had to massively reduce limits, but our customers are more than willing to pay the price for more safety and to be protected. We also had to siphon a lot of computation time from training the newest Grok 4.5 model, but we think that nobody will notice."

Interviewer:

>"Well... uhm... thank you for your time."

I’m not even talking about anything NSFW. You can’t run proper action scenes, put characters in distress, or mildly harm them without getting moderated to hell.

My frustration comes from working on a live-action AI movie, and being completely unable to create many scenes that I didn’t even think would be problematic. I’d been planning to get it as close to an R-rating as possible, but with the current "safety filters", I can’t even get it to PG-13.

Storytelling requires conflict and consequence. These filters treat both as unacceptable risk. At this point, Grok Imagine is just a heavily sanitized children’s illustration engine.

xAI consistently uses the identifiers rRated or r_rated in their web frontend code for Grok Imagine, as well as in their server responses; the flag is applied very loosely to anything that is not 100% child-safe, including anything even remotely "spicy", but also mild violence, etc; it even flags non-visible SFW "nudity" that is merely implied as rRated.

Elon Musk also used the term "R-rated", claiming that anything allowed in an R-rated movie, should supposedly be allowed in Grok Imagine. It can't be a coincidence that he used the same term.

However, we all know, or should know, that "R-rated" is a blatant lie. Anything beyond tame topless nudity is getting blocked. Any touching or kissing? Moderated. I am currently working on some action scenes containing very mild violence (normal action movie stuff), and I am getting frustrated with the amount of moderation and how restrictive it is.

So, what kind of "R-rated movie" am I going to make without real action scenes where people might actually get hurt, and without any love/sex scenes and no nudity? I guess we can still do some swearing? I think I can confidently claim that it would be impossible to re-create even a single real R-rated movie with Grok Imagine, and even PG-13 movies would be a big challenge without getting moderated to hell.

So, what do you think? Did they ever have the intention for real R-rated content to be possible? Did they scratch it, but still kept using the term?

After the last reset, that seems to have happened for all users, I am wondering whether the total weekly limits have increased, since I have the feeling that percentages go up much slower than before for me (SuperGrok Heavy). It's hard to tell, since we never get any absolute numbers, though. Has anybody collected some comparable numbers, yet? Am I just imagining things, or do people have similar experiences?

They just reset the weekly quota, while my regular weekly quota will already reset in 4 hours. I am on a SuperGrok Heavy subscription. That means: I'll have to spend my whole heavy weekly quota within 4 hours in fear of not missing out. I hope they have enough server capacities. :-D

So, I just had my first week with the new weekly limits on a SuperGrok Heavy account; and, no, I didn't make it through the whole week, even though I really tried to take it slowly. You get a usable amount of creations, but it's only a faint shadow of its past, lower than what you used to be able to create with a normal SuperGrok account. I have a discounted $99/month subscription, for which I think the limit might still be reasonable to get decent usage, and for xAI to be able to make a profit. But, I doubt that a $300/month subscription is worth it. I think they should just make the discounted price to be the regular one.

Costs for chat and Grok Build seem negligible on this tier. I didn't use them excessively, but I used them consistently, and they came out at 5% and 2% usage, respectively. I tinkered a bit with Grok Imagine API usage (OAuth), which is expensive af, and cost me 4% of my quota for only a few short test videos (less than 5). The rest (89%) was Grok Imagine use.

I also tried out the top-up option ($5), just out of curiosity for the pricing. These are my measurements for videos:

480p: $0.031/s
720p: $0.045/s
1080p: $0.115/s

This is less than half than the prices when using the Grok developer API, but it's still very expensive, and will burn through your added credits immediately. If I had to give a rough estimate, it's probably at least ten times as expensive than what you pay for your weekly quota, and definitely not worth it.

I've heard and tested to confirm that moderation has increased for fictional anime characters. Initially unrelated to that (but it probably might), I tested some other prompts, and found that Grok is now fully moderating (almost 100%) any kind of unrealistic "nudity". Now, you can't even generate a photo of an unclothed Greek statue in a museum, unless you literally put a fig leaf on its bits. An unclothed shopping window mannequin gets treated the same way, unless it is completely bland and featureless.

We're talking about pictures that should be considered perfectly SFW. Is this the
"R-rated content" Elon Musk was talking about? This is getting ridiculous.

It seems that xAI keeps working night and day to further restrict their product, and make it "child-safe" or whatever, instead of actually improving it.

Since yesterday, there seems to be a new moderation layer for image creation, that immediately rejects anything that could (in theory) become NSFW, and it's more than just filtering some key words. The rejection is immediate, and doesn't even start any computation whatsoever. It's in place for both quality and fast mode.

It seems to understand very complex situations, and has an exceptional grasp on language. It's like when you have a prompt that might get moderated 10-20% of the time, you now have to explain within the prompt how you will prevent those exact cases from occurring. But, you have to really describe it with conviction, or it will not believe you, and still reject your prompt.

I wish they would put that much effort into actually improving the product instead of restricting/castrating it. Oh, and of course: the fully rejected prompts (that caused almost no computation) all decrease your quota anyway. Who'd have thought.

Just venting a bit, because I'm pissed. I'm trying to use the "Image Edit" feature to create an establishing shot for a scene of a short movie I'm trying to create; simply a few people gathered in a room. I'm using multiple reference pictures to add the characters and background that I want. The scene:

• is completely SFW
• has NO nudity
• has NO violence
• has only fully adult characters
• only uses purely AI-generated assets created with Grok Imagine

Despite all of that, 30-40% of my image edits get moderated (there is no reason, so there should be 0% moderation). Of course they won't (deliberately) tell us what triggers moderation; so we're just left clueless. I still get some usable results, but it's eating through at least 30% of my rate limits for NO fucking reason whatsoever.

Everybody who says they NEVER have problems with moderation, and only "gooners" trying to create explicit porn are complaining are simply lying; or they are exclusively creating funny cat videos or some shit.