Grok AI is a chatbot created by multi-billionaire Elon Musk in 2023 and is a lesser known rival to ChatGPT. Grok is claimed to be a more “rebellious” artificial intelligence with a “bit of wit” according to xAI. By “rebellious,” do we mean fuelling and pushing child pornography on social media? Evidence appears to be saying yes.
Grok AI is currently facing legal scrutiny due to nonconsensual artificially generated pornography, a lot of which depicts children. Not only was this content against laws and guidelines, it was also monetized and promoted on X. Grok can take images of anybody and remove clothing as desired by whoever gets their hands on said pictures. It has been reported by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) that in just 11 days, Grok AI has created approximately 3 million sexualized photos, around 23,000 of which contain minors. On Jan. 2 alone, 2 million of these images were posted.
These images range from celebrities, politicians, random people, and as previously mentioned, minors and children. According to the CCDH, a sexualized image of a child was created by Grok once every 41 seconds during the aforementioned 11 days.
Ashley St. Clair, whom Musk has a young child with, has sued xAI due to fake images of her being spread around on the platform. After initially reporting these images to X, she was told that the images didn’t violate X’s policies. While X promised that the images wouldn’t be allowed to be used, X then removed St. Clair’s premium subscription and continued the use of the images of her.
Grok, unlike Google and OpenAI, does not use the same filters to sort out sexual and explicit content. Is this what makes it so “rebellious” (xAI) and “based” (Contarctica) compared to other artificial intelligence?
Late last year a case in Louisiana was reported of a 13 year old girl falling victim to artificially generated images of herself and her friends. These fake nude images of her, her seven friends, and even two adults were being shared all over Snapchat and possibly TikTok. School officials had been very skeptical at first, and nothing had been resolved. When the girl in the case caught a boy showing these images of “her” to his friends on the bus, the girl and some other students ended up fighting this boy. The fight then got posted on Facebook, and the girl got suspended for 10 weeks and was moved to a different school.
Ultimately, two boys ended up being charged with 10 counts of unlawful dissemination of AI-created images, which is a new Louisiana state law. The girl was allowed to return to her original school, but was still on probation. She fell behind on assignments and was then treated for anxiety and depression.
Was the trauma that this child and other millions of people go through worth it so that you can generate silly images of your dog in a tutu? Is it worth the waste of water and the pollution that this world is enduring? That’s up to you to decide. This is just one instance of the harmful effects artificially generated and edited images have on children, and it’s not going away anytime soon.
The risk of AI manipulation is just one of the many risks that children endure. Posting children online carries many dangers as well. For those of you who are active in the football scene, you might know what I’m referencing here. There was a little girl making NFL game predictions online and every team she chose to win would end up losing their respective game. This young child was getting full on death threats over this. No child deserves to get death threats because of silly little online videos. Social media is a very dangerous scene for everybody, especially kids. This is just one example of children being threatened on social media.
Overall, there are just so many dangers of using AI and posting children online. Child predators, traffickers, you name it. Some parents even choose to exploit their children online for views and money. This is, of course, a bigger issue for another time, but it’s important to know that actions have consequences. Post as you wish, and just be aware of the risks and dangers that it imposes.
The investigation and legalities with Grok are ongoing as of writing this, but X has since claimed to have removed Grok’s ability to edit images of real people into sexualized images. X has stated that “We remain committed to making X a safe platform for everyone. We continue to have zero tolerance for any forms of child sexual exploitation, non-consensual nudity and unwanted sexual content.”
