An iPhone Air on a MagSafe charging stand. | Image by PhoneArena
Google can’t seem to catch a break since yesterday: first YouTube went down across the U.S. and then the company’s app apparently started sending out inappropriate links to iPhone users. According to multiple reports, the odd behavior was seen across quite a significant number of iPhones and even Canadian users seem to be receiving the notification.
Google sends out a Grok notification
Multiple iPhone users have reported receiving a Grok notification from their Google app. There is no explanation or any rationale provided alongside this notification, it just showed up. Users who tapped on the notification were taken to the Grok website, to a specific GIF to be precise.
The GIF, which I am not going to link here for obvious reasons, is of an AI-generated woman performing rather inappropriately in front of a camera. To save everyone the trouble of having to imagine what the GIF is about, let’s just say that it’s not something that the official Google app should be sending out to iPhone users.
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Did you get the Grok notification on your iPhone too?
A possible hack or a developer mistake?
Grok was recently criticized for generating explicit content of real people on X. | Image by PhoneArena
A cause for this weird behavior from the Google app has not yet been narrowed down, and the company has not released a statement acknowledging the mishap either. It is entirely possible that, during the aforementioned YouTube outage, someone managed to infiltrate Google’s systems and played a prank.
However, it is also quite possible that this link was something that a developer over at Google accidentally sent out en masse via the app. As one commenter points out, this might have happened due to someone “vibe coding”, a practice that mostly utilizes AI to write the code for you. If that’s the case, then someone’s probably getting fired by tonight.
Even the biggest systems can fail
This is, of course, pretty surprising, but not too unexpected for people who have kept up with the news recently. The YouTube outage and the multiple Cloudflare failures before that, coupled with a number of other system-level problems that have occurred recently have served as strong reminders that our biggest, most important systems are not infallible.
Though, I must admit, getting sent to inappropriate AI-generated content straight from the Google app is definitely a first. Thankfully, if this was a hack rather than some developer’s mistake, it wasn’t as malicious as it could have been. Many people, myself included, would have tapped on an unusual notification from Google.
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Abdullah loves smartphones, Virtual Reality, and audio gear. Though he covers a wide range of news his favorite is always when he gets to talk about the newest VR venture or when Apple sets the industry ablaze with another phenomenal release.
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