The workers with knowledge of the project said it was initially intended to improve the chatbot’s voice capabilities, and the number of sexual or vulgar requests quickly turned it into an NSFW project.
“It was supposed to be a project geared toward teaching Grok how to carry on an adult conversation,” one of the workers said. “Those conversations can be sexual, but they’re not designed to be solely sexual.”
“I listened to some pretty disturbing things. It was basically audio porn. Some of the things people asked for were things I wouldn’t even feel comfortable putting in Google,” said a former employee who worked on Project Rabbit.
“It made me feel like I was eavesdropping,” they added, “like people clearly didn’t understand that there’s people on the other end listening to these things.”