Groks’ AI chatbot is causing a big stir in England and elsewhere, it has been blocked in Malaysia and Indonesia already.
The AI tool creates digital images of women and girls naked without consent and is classed as deepfake sexual abuse by campaigners.
Users are able to ask the system to make a picture simply by sending it a tweet. That led to a trend in which users send the system an image of a clothed person – sometimes underage – and asked it to undress them, which it did.
Keir Starmer said he backed Ofcom, which is looking into X and xAI – Elon Musk’s firm which created Grok. They are looking at how the ‘Online Safety Act’ is breached and what they are going to do about it. Starmer has asked for “all options to be on the table”.
“This is disgraceful. It’s disgusting. And it’s not to be tolerated,” the prime minister said.
“X has got to get a grip of this. Ofcom has our full support to take action in relation to this. This is wrong.
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Elon Musk’s company has now made this available to subscribers only and removed the ability to fake sexualised images of minors.
Elon Musk has said critics of his social media site X are looking for “any excuse for censorship”. They were also told that “they want to supress free speech” by Musk.
There are many news reports about the outrage caused by this technological development. The biggest concern is how easy it has become to create realistic fake images of female nudity and the ability to make them pose in any position the user wants them in.
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Is This Just The Start?
There are other ways that these types of images can be faked that have nothing to do with Grok it’s just Grok has made it quick and easy. Elon Musk has always been a controversial figure and will continue to be, he pushes boundaries and let’s face it he loves the attention.
Look what I can do, this is a world first, my tech is ground breaking, aren’t I genius, we love you Elon, is what he hears in his dreams probably. For him I would say this has much more to do with his ego and being a pioneer techie than a pervert. At least he is transparent and upfront about what he does.
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But I would say in the future this type of tech will be much more subversive, hidden behind anonymous looking businesses with very low profiles and little recourse. If you think Elon Musk is a bad guy now there will be worse to come and it will make people rich, the wrong kind of people will reap the benefits.
After all how will they be stopped, bear in mind AI tech is still at the early stages its abilities are only now being discovered in many ways. This is just one of them and it will be relatively simple to reproduce this type of tech in the future.
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Ofcom based in England have the ‘Online Safety Act’ which was introduced in 2023 but is still relatively under developed and is trying to find ways to control Elon Musk’s latest creation. The current possible proposal is to ban ‘X’ t to become a communist type country controlling your online freedom, that won’t work.
We as most countries across the world live in a democracy where freedom of speech is heralded and supressing that will never end well. The idea of outright bans flies in the face of freedom and the ability to choose.
Cryptocurrency is not real money it helps criminals hide their ill gotten gains it has to be stopped, nope. The dark web has to be stopped because the bad guys swapping secrets, guns for sale, drug peddling, nope. We have to stop global hackers immediately they are causing untold damage to our economy and to the people of our countries, nope.
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I am not trying to sound like a total pessimist, but a realist. The technological developments I have just mentioned have been around for years and are not going anywhere and ‘nope’ is not an option.
You Can’t Ban Them Or Stop Them, What Can You Do?
There is no magic formula, all we can do in England and across the world is manage the issues. I know that’s a disappointing answer and it’s far from full proof but there it is.
Governments and institutions throughout the world either together or separately are going to have to find solutions, safeguards, virtual barriers. This demands massive investment in tech resources and powerful governing bodies to hold the likes of Elon Musk to account. That can be the only solution that will work, it will have great successes and terrible failures at times, the wonders of technology!
