Well, I mean c’mon, that’s only fair. Elmo paid $44 billion to make people stop making fun of him when he bought Twitter. If $44 billion can’t buy you a little “free speech”, what can?
I mean, this is all just the next iteration of Photoshop, isn’t it? Much faster and easier to use, but still essentially the same thing.
Saying that Grok is making porn is exactly the type of anthropomorphism we’re trying to avoid here. Grok didn’t do anything - some pervert used Grok software to make porn.
If Photoshop did all the work at your command, including generating an entire image at your request, I suppose.
It’s like saying a modern washing machine is the same thing as an old wash board. Yes, in that both end with your clothes being clean when you’re done.
Also, imagine that your clothes are being washed in a laundromat with millions of people around to see your dirty underwear stains getting scrubbed out.
So what are we opposed to here - clean clothes in general? If something is wrong when done fast, it’s wrong when done slow.
Ladies and gentlemen: the internet.
So long as it’s your choice to put it there, I don’t see a problem.
Imagine the laundry machine can also launder money in the legal sense if you ask it to. In other words, you can use it to break the law. Granted, you’re the person directing it, but someone is knowingly enabling the criminal behavior and doesn’t care, because they’re not putting safeguards in place to not stifle its capabilities.
You can’t break the law with Photoshop?
The average person is not going to be able to use Photoshop to generate pornography, no. No more than the average person could make a realistic pornographic image of a person with a paintbrush and watercolors.
I’ve been using software like Photoshop most of my life, well enough to do it as part of my professional career (generating images for web sites for example), and I doubt I’d be able to do anything approaching what AI could do in this realm, even given hours of time. While AI could let someone with barely any technical or artistsic skill do it in moments.
It’s like asking what’s wrong with letting people have unfettered access to guns if a rock or even a fist can kill someone just as dead.
So only trained professionals should be allowed to make realistic pornographic images of celebrities without their consent?
What you’re saying can be interpreted as smacking of elitism. Your problem isn’t that it’s done, but that it’s done by the hoi polloi.
Is this sarcasm? Because I thought you were much more intelligent than this.
I’m pretty sure this is some ironic point that’s going over my head.
Yeah, I’m sorry. That was uncalled for. Sometimes I find myself arguing with what I imagine people are saying instead of what they are actually saying.
You’re someone I respect so that line of questioning took me aback, and before I attacked you (this is the Pit) I wanted to check, because that didn’t seem like you.
No offense taken.
The point remains: people are putting up manufactured pornography - including child pornography and pictures of actual, unwilling people altered to be pornographic - on social media for all to see, and Elon Musk has been openly facilitating this through providing a tool that makes it easy for anyone at all to do this and through providing the medium to host these pictures.
And that’s very, very bad.
As with so much else since the advent of computers, it’s not so much that they enable new things to be done. They just enable existing things to be done at vast scale for little investment by people of little skill. Which results in vastly more of those existing things.
Whether it’s academic plagiarism, spam emails & txts, anti-social bots on social media, or now homebrew deepfakes and fake porno, the result is an explosion in volume of the stuff.
Sometimes quantity really does cause a qualitative difference in the world around it.
“A Logic Named Joe”: a publicly accessible prompt allows people online to get advice on how to get away with murder, or for minors to gain access to porn.
And yet in principle it’s no different than Hustler magazine publishing (obviously) fake photos of female celebrities in degrading sexual poses for parody purposes. It’s just that now everyone has access to the equivalent of a photography studio and a dedicated airbrush artist. The moral of the story being that increasingly one must doubt or at least critically examine everything on the Internet whatsoever. Who is naive enough to actually believe anything they read or see on the Web?
Another edition to the “Grok is a Real Boy” file - earlier today, multiple sources reported that Grok has made image generation available to paid members only. (As if putting a paywall on child porn makes it OK.)
Turns out that’s completely false, and all they did was disable the option to generate photos by replying to Grok and left the other ways to access it freely available, because their source for this claim was “Grok told us so”.
But Grok told us Grok was telling the truth. Who are we, mere humans, to question the pronouncements of the Great Grok?
It’s a Good Grok.
“In time you will come to regard me not only with respect and awe, but with love.”
Elon says that not letting people distribute child porn and snuff films on his website is “censorship”.
From the linked article:
X has now limited the use of AI image function to those who pay a monthly fee, a change dubbed by Downing Street as “insulting” to victims of sexual violence.
Somehow, this was the kind of response I was expecting from Elmo. The only problem is clearly that he wasn’t giving out free speech for free