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Let’s be honest with ourselves: if a broadcaster or newspaper had started publishing thousands of non-consensual, sexually explicit images of women or — even worse — of children, politicians and regulators would be out for blood. It would be a front-page, ongoing scandal and the organization responsible would be quickly brought to heel because it would be so outrageous. But when Elon Musk and his chatbot Grok do it, there’s somehow little more than crickets. Politicians are alarmed and say something needs to be done, but can’t quite say what that something is. Regulators say they’re investigating, as thousands more women and children are victimized while the richest man in the world continues treating the whole situation like a big game — or simulation. Since Musk took over Twitter and mutated it into X back in 2022, the platform has taken a hard turn to the right, blasting conspiratorial and right-wing opinions into its users feed and encouraging the kind of vile discourses Musk seems to delight in consuming and engaging with. It has restored far-right accounts and sought to explicitly shape the narratives on issues to align with Musk’s increasingly extreme political positions. There has been reason to take action against X for a long time. But if spinning up a chatbot that enables the creation of child pornography and for any user to undress any woman on the platform at their whim isn’t enough to finally ban it, what will ever force regulators and political leaders to take action? The AI deepfake problemWhen Elon Musk announced he was creating the “everything app” in 2022, people assumed it could mean a lot of things. Musk clearly wanted to revive his plans to create an online bank, and there was talk of expanding to encompass shopping, video calls, a dating app, and much more. What no one expected was that “everything” would also include the generation of non-consensual explicit images of women and children. The Grok chatbot has gone through a series of scandals since it began being rolled out to Twitter/X premium users in November 2023. After tweaks by the team that runs it, the bot has become fixated on right-wing obsessions like white genocide in South Africa, announced itself to be MechaHitler, and declared Musk to be the best at virtually anything — including drinking piss. Last year, Musk made it clear he would be leaning into the worst impulses of some of his obsessive user base (and likely his own desires). An AI girlfriend named “Ani” was added to the chatbot, allowing users to have sexually explicit conversations and to get her to strip down in the process. In November, he even posted an AI-generated video of a woman saying, “I will always love you,” showing the extent of his pathetic desperation. But that effort reached its apotheosis at the turn of the new year when the platform started being flooded with images generated by Grok of scantily clad and naked women and children. A deranged user could simply reply to an image posted to the platform to request the chatbot produce an image undressing the person in it, and it would follow through. Despite posts by Musk and the X Safety account saying they took illegal content, particularly child sexual abuse material, seriously, Grok has not been disabled. An analysis performed in early January found that Grok had become one of the leading producers of AI-generated deepfakes online, producing 6,700 sexually suggestive or nudifying images every hour — far more than the next top 5 deepfake websites combined. A Wired investigation also found what was being posted on X was just the tip of the iceberg. Grok is available through other means beyond the X platform, where it’s allowing people to generate much more violent sexual images, which can include minors. The problem of AI-generated explicit images isn’t new. It’s been an issue since the early days of the generative AI hype wave, and was not an unknown thing even before it. But the image generators that have been developed in the past few years have made it much worse. It broke out into the open two years ago, when Taylor Swift was the subject of deepfake images. But the truth is this can affect anyone. On X, women celebrating achievements, sharing posts that contain an image of themselves, or even just posting a selfie are finding themselves being undressed in the comments. It’s unconscionable, and shocking there hasn’t been swifter action to shut it down. That must change. It’s time for action against XIn August 2024, Brazil took a bold and courageous action. The Supreme Court had ordered X to suspend far-right accounts that had actively worked to try to overthrow Brazilian democracy in the attempted coup on January 8, 2023. But Elon Musk refused the order, and the company would not appoint a representative in Brazil. Since the order would not be followed, the Supreme Court knew what it had to do: it banned X in Brazil. For over a month, Musk’s social media platform wasn’t available in South America’s most populous nation. That is, until Musk relented. X paid the fines that were owed, appointed a representative in Brazil, and banned the accounts Musk had refused to take off the platform, leading to the platform’s reinstatement in October 2024. It’s a great example of how governments can use their leverage, but this time they should go much further. Regulators and politicians in some countries have been responding to what’s happening on X. The European Union, United Kingdom, France, and Australia are all investigating the matter, with some even saying what X is enabling is illegal. Indian officials gave X a 72-hour deadline to act on the illegal material, while some Brazilian politicians are calling for the platform to be banned once again. But let’s be real: the responses of regulators to a child porn-producing chatbot on the social media platform owned by the richest man in the world are not nearly strong or quick enough. Creating a chatbot that victimizes thousands of women on command and generates child pornography should be a red line — and not one you can come back from. Elon Musk and anyone at X or xAI directly working on that functionality should be criminally held to account for the consequences of their actions. But many countries will not have jurisdiction for those crimes. Instead, they should take the obvious move of banning X before the harm it causes their citizens escalates even further. Musk has a long history of getting a pass because of the profile he’s built up over the past couple decades, and the wealth that has come with it. Now that he maintains close links with a US government that has made opposing regulatory enforcement of social media companies a key part of its foreign policy, some governments are even more hesitant to act against him. But in a moment like this, the choice becomes quite stark: do governments exist to serve the public or cower at the feet of Elon Musk? The answer should be an easy one at any time. But especially after a year where Musk has made his fascist politics clear, taken actions that have conservatively killed hundreds of thousands of people, sought to interfere in the politics of countries the world over, and now created a chatbot that makes it easy to generate child pornography, there’s no reason for political leaders to stay on Musk’s good side. It’s time to ban X, and hopefully one day see Musk behind bars for his crimes.
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