The word Grok, which Elon Musk adopted for the name of his generative chatbot integrated with the social-media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, was coined by sci-fi writer Robert A. Heinlein. In a 1961 story, Heinlein used it to mean something like "intuitive sympathetic understanding." Heinlein must be spinning in his grave right now, because nothing could be further from intuitive sympathetic understanding than discovering that a chatbot has taken your image and turned it into, pardon the expression, masturbation fodder.
A nonprofit called the Center for Countering Digital Hate announced on Jan. 22 that the Grok chatbot had produced an estimated three million sexualized images in an 11-day period in December and early January. An estimated 23,000 of these were of children under 18. These estimates come from a sample of 20,000 images analyzed by the center and sorted by means of AI, with the ones suspected of showing children subject to manual inspection.
This revelation and similar discoveries have created a firestorm of legal actions. Thirty-five state attorneys general have sent a letter to Musk threatening investigations and prosecutions for violating various laws against dissemination of child sexual abuse material. A class-action suit involving over 100 plaintiffs has been filed in California, alleging that thousands of women "have been digitally stripped and forced into sexual situations that they never consented to." Once such images appear in public, they can create false impressions of a person's behavior for years.
For his part, Musk has claimed that the feature enabling these deepfakes would be limited to paid subscribers. He displayed the results of what happened when he asked Grok to generate a photo of himself in a bikini. He has even gone so far as to deny any of this was happening. Despite his responses, Grok and its parent organizations are now facing threats of legal action both in the U. S. and in the European Community, which has much stricter laws than many U. S. states about sexualized deepfakes.
The phrase "hitting the fan" really is appropriate here. When deepfakes are created by a system intrinsically linked to one of the world's most popular social mediums, of course the stuff is going to fly everywhere. Reportedly, the process was made easier by the availability of a "spicy" option. So it's not like users had to go to a lot of trouble and contortions to force Grok to do something it was reluctant to do. Somebody designed this type of operation to be easy, and there are plenty of guys out there who will stand in line to hand their favorite images over to be sexualized.
Ethically speaking, there are so many things going wrong here that it's hard to focus on the worst ones. I think this perfect storm of ethical lapses arises from a combination of (a) a moral blindness or lack of moral imagination which Musk perfectly exemplifies and (b) the unprecedented power to realize his profit-making and technologically effective ideas in a regulatory environment that he treats like a vacuum.
The moral blindness arises from an adolescent macho attitude which treats women as objects, and sees nothing wrong with this attitude. It is clear that Musk and those who worked for him in creating this fiasco literally can't imagine (or won't imagine) what it's like to be a woman whose face has been plastered onto a body doing something obscene.
It's one thing if the guy doing the plastering is sneaking around in a back alley behind a porn shop because he can't afford to buy what he wants, and is going through the shop's trash barrel to put something together for his evil desires. But it's quite another when the exact same attitude toward women is held by the world's richest man, whose power to do either good or harm is historically unprecedented.
What is to be done? And more realistically, what is going to happen in this situation?
In an ideal world, Grok would be shut down—100%—and a thorough investigation and hearing from anyone with a claim to have been injured by its doings would be conducted. A reparation fund cut from a sizable chunk of Musk's billions would be established, and an impartial tribunal would attempt to compensate the injured parties and do a thorough web-cleaning, assisted by Musk's AI genius engineers, to put things back to where they were before the women were digitally assaulted. And Musk would be put on notice that if anything like this happens again, he will be tied to his Starship rocket and launched on a one-way trip to Mars, alone, where he really wants to live anyway.
What will probably happen instead is that the state attorneys general will file suits against Grok, xAI, and any other well-heeled target in sight. The California civil suit will proceed at a pace slowed by the best lawyers Musk's money can buy. As noted by Derek Johnson, writing in an article in Cyberscoop, the U. S. federal legal system has been notably silent, which may be due to Musk's favored status in the Trump administration, despite the debacle called DOGE last year.
If we are looking for evidence that out-of-control AI is going to cause great harm, look no farther. No, nobody has died physically from this particular disaster. It doesn't fit the mold of the typical sci-fi AI apocalypse in which evil disembodied voices emerge from everybody's smartphone as the power goes out and the supply chains fall idle. But ask any one of those women who have been undressed and worse by Grok about how they feel about what they've been through. For them, it's been worse than 9/11, the 2008 market crash, and COVID rolled into one. The fact that it's "only" a few thousand children being exploited isn't important.
In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky writes of a conversation between Ivan, a cynical man of the world, and Alyosha, his brother who was a believer in God. In Chapter 4, Ivan brings up the subject of the way some children are tormented by their own parents, even parents who are "most worthy and respectable people, of good education and breeding." Then Ivan says something that we all need to be reminded of: "In every man, of course, a demon lies hidden—the demon of rage, the demon of lustful heat at the screams of the tortured victim, the demon of lawlessness let off the chain. . . ."
Every human being is capable of doing despicable things to children. I am, you are, everybody is. But civilization is made possible by each person's exertion of self-control to restrain that and other evil desires. It is corrosive to civilization to provide a means by which evil desires may flourish at the expense of the innocent. And in allowing Grok to be exploited in such a way, Musk and his underlings are polluting the spiritual lives of millions, and will answer to a higher court than even Musk can send lawyers to.
Sources: I referred to an article in the Jan. 29 edition of the Austin American-Statesmen entitled "Grok made 3M explicit images in 11 days" by Andrea Guzmán, the Center for Countering Digital Hate's posting at https://counterhate.com/research/grok-floods-x-with-sexualized-images/, the website https://cyberscoop.com/grok-undressed-victims-file-class-action-lawsuit-against-xai-elon-musk/, and Wikipedia articles on Grok (chatbot) and Grok (the word). The Brothers Karamazov quotes are from the Constance Garnett translation.
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