Grok is awful but banning X is a betrayal of free speech |
Since late December, Elon Musk’s X has become awash with deepfake sexually explicit images of women, and in some instances, children. Users ask the platform’s AI tool Grok to generate this kind of visual media (“Grok put this woman in a bikini” goes a standard prompt) and Grok obliges. It is not possible to speak to the private motivation behind every request, but the instinct to humiliate and degrade the victim strikes me as paramount.
That 90 per cent of the above paragraph would have been incomprehensible to the average reader just a year ago speaks to the vertiginous pace at which the internet develops. Any government wanting to moderate the worst effects of X – or at one point in the recent past, the more pressing case of Facebook – would have been stuck in a doom loop of whack-a-mole. The state gets a handle on the........