Grok’s nonconsensual porn problem is part of tech’s long, gross legacy

Elon Musk has been there for a few weeks Grok's AI bot generated pornographic images of women and underage girls, without their consent, at an astonishing rate. A current one The Bloomberg analysis found that Grok is creating something 6,700 such images per hour, i.e. more than one per minute. On Friday, X finally introduced some minor guardrails to the tool with a new policy Only paid subscribers can use Grok to create or modify images. However, with the standalone Grok app, anyone can do it Ask Grok to generate new imageswhich means the deepfake porn continues.

Grok has been one of the more impressive large AI models in a long timewith “spicy” and “sexy” settings that can be turned on and off. While employees have warned that the Bot is used to create child sexual abuse materialsMusk has remained committed to the idea that Grok would be the sexiest AI model. On X, Musk has defended the choice on business groundsciting the famous story of how VHS defeated Betamax in the 1980s after the porn industry put its weight behind VHSwith its larger storage capacity. “VHS won in the end,” Musk wrote, “partly because they allowed sharp mode 😉.”

There is some truth in Musk's opinion. The porn industry tends to reward early adopters, and the money that can be made from porn means it has a formidable influence when it comes to choosing between two competing and incompatible forms of technology.

But the idea that porn, as a neutral and amorphous industry, settles technology wars doesn't tell us the whole truth. It would be more accurate to say that the technologies we use to generate and share images are, in most cases, shaped by people distributing images of women's bodies – often with the dubious consent of the women themselves. In this sense, Grok's skills are self-evident.

Porn didn't just help VHS beat Betamax. The industry has also been linked to the Mainstreaming Super 8 Films (easy and convenient for amateur filmmakers), the Streaming video development (private and easily accessible), the Development of web payments (comes with paywall streaming video) that Development of web analytics (good for the complex business transactions of adult streaming) and that Victory of the Blu-ray via HD DVD. (Like VHS, Blu-rays contained much more data than their competitors, which is particularly attractive in the porn market.)

Then there were the systems of image distribution that developed outside of the porn industry. A surprising number of these revolved around people trying to share sexualized images of women's bodies as quickly as possible – except in these cases, the people whose images were being shared weren't necessarily consenting adults who were being paid for their efforts.

Sometimes the innovation was more or less harmless. Google Images was developed Because in 2000, so many people went looking for pictures of Jennifer Lopez in her famous low-cut Versace dress, an accolade that Lopez treated like a feather in her cap. In this case, Lopez wore the dress to a high-profile event and wanted to be seen and talked about, so it's reasonable to assume approval.

Sometimes it got cloudier. The impetus for YouTube came when developers wanted to watch Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction in 2004 and were frustrated that it took so long to find a video of it on the internet. Jackson always maintained that she had no intention of having her breasts seen on national television, so we're dealing with non-consensual nudity here.

Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg was the founding father of Facebook FacesmashA Hot or not A rip-off designed to compare the women of Harvard University's student body to farm animals. The intent here was less to create non-consensual pornography and more to perform sexualized humiliation of non-consenting women—an act that proved so popular that it overwhelmed Harvard's servers on the night of its release.

So Musk has a point when he says that technologies in what he euphemistically calls “spicy mode” tend to do well. A more accurate formulation, however, might be that in our misogynistic society, the objectification and humiliation of reluctant women's bodies is so valuable that the fate of world-changing technologies depends on how well they enable it.

AI should always be used for this in one way or another. But only someone as brutally callous and willing to cut corners as Elon Musk would allow something to go so wrong.