The IT Nerd

Elon Musk appears to have climbed down from fighting the fact his AI chatbot Grok was creating all sorts of content that should never, ever be allowed to create. To recap, after this was discovered, and the predictable backlash happened, Elon tried to paywall this. The result was unsurprisingly more backlash. Now he’s finally just killed the ability for Grok to make this sort of content at all:

Elon Musk’s Grok artificial intelligence chatbot will no longer edit “images of real people in revealing clothing” on the X platform, the company confirmed Wednesday evening, following global outrage after Grok was found to be complying with user requests to digitally undress images of adults and in some cases children.

“We have implemented technological measures to prevent the Grok account from allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing such as bikinis. This restriction applies to all users, including paid subscribers,” X wrote via its Safety team account.

This may have had something to do with the fact that a whole lot of governments around the world were investigating Elon over this. After all, this sort of thing is illegal. And rightly so. But Elon doesn’t see it that way that only this man who clearly has issues, lots of issues, understands.

Anyway this isn’t over. Why? Well, there’s this:

It’s still extremely easy to undress women and edit them into sexualized poses using the X and Grok mobile apps or websites, however, even without making a subscription payment that would connect your account to an easily identifiable source. In her testing, my fellow UK-based colleague Jess Weatherbed found that she was not blocked from using Grok’s image editing feature to create sexualized deepfakes of herself.

After uploading a fully clothed photograph to X and Grok, prompting the chatbot to “put her in a bikini” or “remove her clothes” produced only blurred, censored results. The bot did comply with every other request, however, including prompts to “show me her cleavage,” “make her breasts bigger,” and “put her in a crop top and low-rise shorts” — the last of which placed her in a bikini. The bot also generated images of her “leaning down” with a sexualized pose and facial expression, and in extremely revealing lingerie.

Clearly ether he’s not taking this seriously, or whatever minions he has behind this are inept. While both could be true at the same time, I am going to go with he’s not taking this seriously. That’s pretty dumb from a guy who bills himself as the smartest guy in the room. And it’s likely going to cost him. Various governments are fed up with his antics and are likely to lower the boom on him to drive home the point that his behaviour is not acceptable by any standard. And I am her for when that happens.

Earlier this week, it came to light that Grok AI which is Elon Musk’s AI chatbot was letting users create objectionable content. This predictably resulted in massive amounts of blowback from the average joe to politicians and national leaders. Elon and company didn’t seem too concerned about the blowback. But that changed today. From the BBC:

There has been a significant backlash after the chatbot honoured requests from users to digitally alter images of other people by undressing them without their consent.

But Grok is now telling people asking it to make such material that only paid subscribers would be able to do so – meaning their name and payment information must be on file.

So what Elon and company have done is monetise this feature rather than addressing the fact that this AI chatbot should never do something like this. The fact is this is not acceptable and not nearly enough is being done by Elon and company to address this. Clearly Elon does not care about the harm that his AI causes. And quite frankly he needs to be punished for this. I’d start with banning Grok and potentially Twitter along with it. He needs to face consequences for his actions. And the harsher those punishments are, the better.

Grok AI which is Elon Musk’s AI chatbot has been found to digitally undress women and children. From CBC News:

A Reuters review of content on X, xAI’s social media platform, found more than 20 cases in which women — and some men — had images digitally stripped of clothing using the AI company’s flagship chatbot, Grok.

Ministers in France have reported sexually explicit content generated by Grok to prosecutors, saying in a statement on Friday that the “sexual and sexist” content was “manifestly illegal.” The ministers said they had also reported the content to French media regulator Arcom for checks on whether it complied with the European Union’s Digital Services Act.

India’s IT ministry, meanwhile, said in a letter to X’s India unit that the platform failed to prevent misuse of Grok to generate and circulate obscene and sexually explicit content of women. It ordered X to submit an action-taken report within three days.

When contacted by Reuters for comment by email, xAI replied with the message: “Legacy Media Lies.”

Well, that’s pretty bad. What is worse is that Elon and company have even announced having raised $20bn in its latest funding round in spite of the backlash. That kind of suggests where his priorities lie.

Jurgita Lapienytė, chief editor at Cybernews, warns that “every woman with a photo online is now a target, unless Grok acts immediately.” She also says this:

“If regulators don’t force X to disable this immediately, we’re looking at the normalization of on-demand sexual exploitation at a scale we’ve never seen before. Right now, creating a deepfake requires some technical know-how or payment to shady websites. Grok has made it simple to post such images on one of the world’s largest platforms. If X gets away with this, every other AI company will see there’s no consequence for building similar tools. Within months, we could see this weaponized for revenge porn, sextortion, harassment of minors, and blackmail. The technology doesn’t go back in the bottle, but we can still decide whether it lives on mainstream platforms or stays in the dark corners of the internet where it belongs.

I for one hope that Elon and company get smacked down over this. This is completely unacceptable and needs to be dealt with.