Grok assumes users seeking images of underage girls have “good intent”
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I like it.. Jesus would have a hard time now a days. IMHO I think Musk and company are deserving of Old Testament punishments, pre-Jesus.
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Low-accuracy CSAM is still a problem.
First, there's non-exploitative images of naked kids all over the place. Baby photos, kids at the beach (in many countries that's normal), medical imagery, etc.
Second, there's also CSAM all over the place. Training sets are basically everything that humanity has ever digitized that AI companies can get their hands on. There's CSAM in the training sets.
You can try to filter out CSAM from your training set, and you can add a filter after the generative bits that rejects CSAM that it detects. But the filters are never going to be perfect, and perverts will quickly learn how to thwart them.
Now, if you wanted to argue to me that maybe this whole generative AI thing is a disaster, I wouldn't contradict you!
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That's basically the implication of my post, yes. At least based on the information I have so far.
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On Bluesky, a former Tumblr dev recounted the time when Apple decided that it couldn’t have any more consensual, adult boobs on its app, and they had two days to change the app for this. They then asked why this hasn’t happened to X
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Keeping in mind that if you delete the account, or don't log in regularly, X will just reassign it to someone else after 30 days. If your account is tied to your real name or a handle you're widely known by, even if you stop using it you may want to take steps to make sure it doesn't get appropriated by some grifter chud who'll use it to generate CSAM in your name.
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Because $$$$$ or getting sued for being a monopoly by X and its much easier to be a saint when you can browbeat smaller devs
I understand that companies may be coerced into advertising on X
Still does not explain why Ars is on X
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What with pics of Elon being on Epstein Island, I’m not surprised Grok acts this way.
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Very important to not infringe on the right of those totally normal well adusted Twitter users to create AI porn of 18 and 19 year olds.
You would have thought the abundance of caution would have been the other way for some companies, like those with functioning legal departments for instance.
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Just following the respectable way shown by the Financial Times.
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But, if Grok were not a vermin-infested shit pile, how could Elon slut-shame little girls, many of whom will not have his children, and own the Libs. Priorities, folks, priorities.
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I'm not trying be in here guilt tripping people or anything, it's just that until the day we can actually survive off of subscribers we have to live in the reality of the ad world.
You have a 16 year old account and 14,000 posts, you spend a lot of time here clearly. Which is great. We haven't put up a paywall, and I hope we never do. You don't have to subscribe to have an opinion here. I'm gonna remind people it's an option and makes a difference, but that's where that ends.
And I have no idea what our future with X is. I've done what I can within my limited capacity on these things to minimize its effect on the site. It's a very deliberate decision to have Mastodon and Bluesky in our footer and no X. We certainly aren't trying to drive traffic to it.
But just in general, be it Ars or somewhere else, as long as journalism has to depend on ads to survive it's always going to be something where you navigate the waters the best you can.
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This makes me suspect that Musk considers this ability to generate deepfake CSAM be a feature and not a bug.
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To add onto @Aurich's point, even if they could walk away from X financially, they may have issues with someone claiming the handle and engaging in the sort of behavior that is normal on X, and would utterly defame Ars and the writers there. Unfortunately, because X doesn't validate anything from anyone, and just wants cash, it's super vulnerable to squatters grabbing IP related handles and impersonating brands.
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Apple is allowed to curate the App Store however they want. That's not monopolistic behaviour. Twitter isn't owed anything by Apple.
Twitter is not owed any ad revenue from companies.
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I think the majority of us Americans are in disbelief our fall has been this fast and dumb. Those with money can buy the government they want openly now and the rich are very good at driving wedges into the general electorate. Until we ban all private money from our elections the U.S. will continue down the spiral into oblivion. There is little we can do as long as our Supreme Court believes the President should have unchecked power, and that money = free speech.
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This horrible flaw is really easy to fix using one secret trick, says seller of one secret trick.
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I do not think you should even ascribe this agency to an LLM. Grok is not a spokesperson at all, it will say anything you ask it to.
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It's occurred to him, but he knows that his primary audience outside of Russian bots is incel pedo Nazis, so he doesn't want to kill his business any more than he already has. Anyone still using that site will have a hard time claiming they're not in that group.
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The only real solution to this is adding a cost to the companies creasting abuse material. Make them responsible, make them liable, make them pay ... big ... if their products produce such material.
So obviously it wont happen.
Corporate profit has always been holy in the US. Its probably more holy now if you are a friend of the Mob President, but neither Democrats nor Republicans ever wishes to actually make the rich and powerful pay.
So obviously it wont happen.
Corporate profit has always been holy in the US. Its probably more holy now if you are a friend of the Mob President, but neither Democrats nor Republicans ever wishes to actually make the rich and powerful pay.
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Seriously, what is the point of including such a sentence? The only knowledge Grok has of what goes on at xAI is whatever would be included in its initial prompt, and that certainly has no reason to be updated in real time to include statements about ongoing controversies. Maybe it would be worth reminding readers of this, even though most of Ars's readership knows it of course very well.
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So CSAM aside... why isn't it a rule to not allow undressing ANYONE? Sure, children especially, but honestly it shouldn't allow it at all... WTF
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Looks like Musk is, at least, partially backing down and limiting access to his image generator to subscribers only... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/09/grok-image-generator-outcry-sexualised-ai-imagery
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You'd think Elon Musk creating a system that automatically produces child porn would be a bigger story but it barely registered. What a great time we live in ...
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Something about that is even more disturbing. Basically, Musk is saying that if you pay him, you can still potentially make CSAM using Grok?
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The whole point of LLMs is to produce plausible-sounding (or -looking in this case) hallucinations outside of their training data. If you only wanted something that can retrieve stuff from training data with accuracy, you’d use a regular database or a regular search engine.
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I think that’s getting a little carried away with the whole “AI is not intelligent” thing. It’s perfectly natural and precise to use “assumes” when talking about computer software, eg if someone says “memcpy assumes that source and destination memory areas do not overlap”, they don’t think memcpy shows any signs of sentience.
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Of course this man:
Is going to assume that anyone seeking images of children has good intent...
Is going to assume that anyone seeking images of children has good intent...
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Better tell the likes of Playboy, Penthouse, OnlyFans, Scoreland and the plethora of other porn companies that they’re working at risk then.
Why are those companies somehow exempt?
There it is! The “…but”! Sex sells, sure. The porn industry is a multi-billion dollar industry. However, CSAM is still illegal and violating a person’s bodily autonomy and integrity is vile. (And quite possibly illegal in certain jurisdictions.)
Is this where you start trying to rationalize the generation of CSAM and sexualized deepfakes of non-consenting adults? Because lumping them under the umbrella of “porn” is a bit disingenuous.
If people are going to riot against the government wanting to shut down the generation of CSAM, I don’t want to live in that society. Additionally, various governments, including the USA, have put limits on what their citizens can and cannot say or do. And excluding the very recent decline of the US into an extremely illiberal society, most countries seem to be operating just fine.
The freedom of speech is not absolute as I’ve already established. And if Grok/Twitter want to operate in various jurisdictions, they need to comply with the laws of those jurisdictions. Fucking easy as!
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To be quite fair, Grok isn’t “automatically” generating CSAM. It has to be prompted to do so.
And what are you talking about? I’ve seen plenty of stories that are covering this topic, which point out the absolute lack of action or even a statement from Musk, until I read the article that @NickHos posted just this morning… and even then, Musk is now explicitly saying that he seems to be okay with making CSAM as long as people pay him for the capability, which is absolutely terrifying but apparently he’s willing to cater to the absolute dregs of humanity and wallow in their company.
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MilanKraft
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
Rule #1 for manipulating the population hasn't changed: distract, distract, distract.
For those who follow ("I'd rather have Putin than a Dem" MAGA-tards, influencers, etc), it provides emo-fuel for their social media goals, which are mostly about circumventing and undermining trust in legitimate outlets like AP or Reuters, and giving stooge politicians their weekly talking points (even if the semantics aren't always the same).
For those who oppose, it forces a reactive, often defensive posture, and drains attention away from the fights that matter most and ultimately, done often enough, exhausts them.
Not sure how we're going to overcome Rule #1 (because they're still using it quite effectively), but we better find a way. For Musk's part he is nothing but a glorified, attention-whoring troll in this context. He doesn't believe half the shit he tweets about; like a petulant child he simply enjoys sewing outrage among those who might oppose him. Classic case of person who has evolved to understand the intricacies of business, maybe some politics in the current era, but emotionally still slave to his inner 19 year old. Also partly explains his 14 kids from 11 different women or whatever the tally is now. His belief in his own "superior genes" is the other part.
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