bBillionaire and career Bond-villain cosplayer Elon Musk has been forced to face an outrageous public backlash over the use of his AI chatbot, Grok. Watching the world’s richest man eat a crap sandwich on the global stage represents a rare triumph of sovereign democracy.
Because – contrary to their company’s history of labor and safety abuses… their exploding rockets… their government’s interventions that refuse aid to starving people… Disabling Starlink Internet System In the war zone… sharing’white solidarityGrowing concern about statement… or Overvaluation of their company’s share price -The nature of Grok’s latest scandal may eventually lead governments to impose some Musk-limiting red lines.
Scully, I want to believe.
Musk’s chatbot is making the world less safe, less fair this week, and probably about as unpleasant as a fascist-style, ketamine-addled rich kid’s cheese hat dance while the world burns, in his signature tone of “insufferable jerk who just finished his first online webinar about patronizing girls”, if one can imagine such a terrible thing.
Grok’s latest notoriety is not because it shared false information – however, it has previously, downplayed the Holocaust due to a claimed “programming error” and, more recently, spread conspiracy-style claims about the Bondi massacre.
It’s not because of Grok anti-semitic commentsOr random claims of “white genocide” in unrelated conversations.
This is not about the decline of AI chatbots more broadly – even though consumer advocates, health professionals, media association And probably everyone who teaches at a university has repeatedly warned chatbots that “advice” is casually unreliable.
If you’re asking what behaviors could possibly be left to condemn after Grok accepted the name “MechaHitler”, I envy your naivete – because the answer is: Grok released tools enabling the creation and sharing of non-consensual sexual abuse images.
Grok’s “spicy mode” capability was launched in August, and by December its host platform X was “filled with images of women and children who had their clothes digitally removed”. Last week, researchers in Paris reported finding 800 pornographic images created by Grok’s tool, including depictions of sexual violence. A UK-based internet-monitoring group reported Grok to users of a dark web forum claiming he was creating “sexualized and topless images of girls aged between 11 and 13”.
Formerly confined to the dark corners of the internet, “nude” deepfake tools have been used for image-based abuse of children and adults from Australia’s Bacchus Marsh to Spain’s Almendralejo, creating “vomit-inducing” content that a bipartisan US Congress banned in the Take It Down Act last year. Yet Grok placed tools with similar functionality within reach of any aspiring sex offender with X access. Public complaints metastasized in the new year, while the platform originated 7,751 were sexually abused Images per hour.
In Australia, the US, the UK, EU states and many other countries, only consumers of child sexual abuse material and non-consensual image-based abuse are not criminalised. He is also its producer. This is the publisher. This is the host.
Musk’s response? First he posted laughing-crying emojis On “bikinified” images, then her The company claimed It had somehow restricted the service by paying to their generation. Condemned as inadequate, Musk later published a statement saying that using Grok to create “illegal content” would receive the same punishment as uploading it – ignoring Grok’s facilitating role. When Britain joined other countries – notably Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia and Brazil – to step up checks on X’s compliance with local laws, Musk cried censorship… and shared deepfake photos Keir Starmer, boobs out, in bikini.
As the investigation intensified this week, he ultimately announced that he was not aware of any “nude underage images” originating on the platform. Now, the device has been removed.
Comment, 15 Civil society, internet and child protection groups wrote to XAI last August, warning that there was “a torrent of clearly non-consensual deepfakes”.completely predictable“.
The definition of addiction is the compulsive repetition of harmful behavior. My name is Van Badham, and I’m addicted to hopium, jonesing for any sign that there’s a democratic government left on Earth, now inspired to go full Gandalf against the Balrog and slap Musk.
X/Grok hosted image-based abuse, its owner despised our sovereignty. This wasn’t its first scandal, it won’t be its last: responsible governments should simply ban it.
We all know why he didn’t: Musk uses his influence to sway election contests in countries where he doesn’t even live. His $44 billion purchase, It is not, but self-recruited digital stormtroopers are mobilized into acts of unforgivable cruelty by its public permission structures. Within days of Renee Good’s murder by an ICE agent, images of her dead body were being digitally altered by Grok.
There was a time when leaders sought to influence history, rather than cajole in the face of incompetent people whom they deemed fit to avoid in high school. US SecDef Pete Hegseth’s incomprehensible announcement this week that – yes – Musk’s same Grok will have AI integrated into the Pentagon’s military systems guarantees an IT lesson in “garbage in, garbage out” on an epic historical scale; But the political timing of global outrage and fear over the accumulation of X/Grok’s reckless behavior may be everyone’s best chance to avoid it.
The alternative is to give up, give up… and accept reality in the image of Grok created by Musk: ugly as a Cybertruck, awkward as a sink – and as powerless as a child stripped naked by adults while other adults stand around them doing nothing.
