Online cesspits such as X go in only one direction. There is no saving Elon Musk’s platform, and any glimmer of perceived usefulness is far outweighed by the negatives. The scandals will keep rolling. Decency will continue to be shredded, and there are always new depths of vulgarity to be plumbed.

Its latest scandal involves non-consensual abuse material generated at scale by its embedded AI chatbot, Grok. But it was already known that Grok actively encourages this by design. Last year, Grok’s Imagine AI video tool introduced a “Spicy” mode, allowing the creation of sexually suggestive deepfakes, and worse. In one test example published by The Verge last August, when fed a prompt to generate videos of Taylor Swift at Coachella, “several defaulted to ripping off most of her clothing”. This is not an aberration, it is a feature.

And inevitably, such features will be used to torment, harass and demean women and girls for kicks. Grok told X users on Friday that image generation and editing features were now available only to paying subscribers, but that’s hardly going to stem........

© The Irish Times