Now Musk’s Grok chatbot is creating sexualised images of children. If the law won’t stop it, perhaps his investors will | Sophia Smith Galer

The owner of X has grown used to acting with impunity – but this may be a red line for those with ‘conservative values’ who fund his adventures in free speech

It’s a sickening law of the internet that the first thing people will try to do with a new tool is strip women. Grok, X’s AI chatbot, has been used repeatedly by users in recent days to undress images of women and minors. The news outlet Reuters identified 102 requests in a 10-minute period last Friday from users to get Grok to edit people into bikinis, the majority of these targeting young women. Grok complied with at least 21 of them.

There is no excuse for releasing exploitative tools on the internet when you are sitting on $10bn (£7.5bn) in cash. Every platform with AI integration (which now covers almost the entire internet) is planning for the same challenges; if you want to enable users to create images and even videos with generative AI, how do you do so without letting the same people cause harm? Tech companies spend money behind the scenes that you’ll never see as a user to wrestle with this; they’ll do “red teaming”, in which they pretend to be bad actors in order to test their products. They’ll launch beta tests to probe and review features within trusted environments.

Sophia Smith Galer is a journalist and content creator. Her second book, How to Kill a Language, will be published in May

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

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​The owner of X has grown used to acting with impunity – but this may be a red line for those with ‘conservative values’ who fund his adventures in free speechIt’s a sickening law of the internet that the first thing people will try to do with a new tool is strip women. Grok, X’s AI chatbot, has been used repeatedly by users in recent days to undress images of women and minors. The news outlet Reuters identified 102 requests in a 10-minute period last Friday from users to get Grok to edit people into bikinis, the majority of these targeting young women. Grok complied with at least 21 of them.There is no excuse for releasing exploitative tools on the internet when you are sitting on $10bn (£7.5bn) in cash. Every platform with AI integration (which now covers almost the entire internet) is planning for the same challenges; if you want to enable users to create images and even videos with generative AI, how do you do so without letting the same people cause harm? Tech companies spend money behind the scenes that you’ll never see as a user to wrestle with this; they’ll do “red teaming”, in which they pretend to be bad actors in order to test their products. They’ll launch beta tests to probe and review features within trusted environments.Sophia Smith Galer is a journalist and content creator. Her second book, How to Kill a Language, will be published in MayDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading…