In March, a girl’s stepfather took his own life after cops discovered that he had used Grok to create 7,000 sexually explicit images using one photo taken when his stepdaughter was 11 years old, the amended complaint alleged.
Grok allowed the man to generate extreme images depicting incest and rape without flagging any harmful behavior, the complaint said. Seemingly, xAI’s child safety system only intervened after the man input a prompt for “gang rape.” That request sent a CyberTip to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which alerted law enforcement to the AI CSAM.
Yet the harm was not stopped then, either. Despite mandatory reporting requirements to share information like a user’s IP address when CSAM is flagged, xAI repeatedly refused to help cops or NCMEC identify the user, the complaint alleged. For weeks, xAI allegedly “obstructed this investigation at every turn” and made it harder for “law enforcement efforts to locate, identify, and apprehend the perpetrator.”
Eventually, the stepfather was arrested after cops obtained a warrant to seize his devices. That’s when “a forensic review revealed approximately 7,000 AI-generated images and videos” depicting his stepdaughter, which were allegedly produced using Grok. Without Grok providing users with easy access to “undressing” capabilities, his family doubts he ever would have generated the harmful images, which he allegedly trafficked online in trade for “CSAM produced by other child sex predators.”
All the people who bought SpaceX stock invested in this. Grok is owned by SpaceX. It would be nice if journalists would put that in their articles.
The CSAM generator is in the index funds 🤢
If you're driving a Tesla, you are funding CSAM.
Lawsuits for this need to start including shareholders as defendants. Make investing in it a civil and reputational liability.
I get the sentiment, but ... they kind of already are.
Being a shareholder means you own part of the company. If the company stands to lose money from this lawsuit, then all the shareholders do as well. (That is, at least, on the somewhat naive assumption that a company's stock price has any relation whatsoever to how much money it has and can make.)
For shareholders and investors, the worst thing that can happen to them right now is the stock going down and having to take a loss on it. It's bounded by however much money they put into it.
If investing in 10 shitty companies knowing that 1 would fail manages to be more profitable than investing in 20 companies that don't degrade the moral fabric of society, there's a perverse incentive to keep investing in companies creating Groks. Making shareholders financially liable for the debts of their investments would introduce an unpredictable risk that could help change the equation.
Every US taxpayer invested in this, involuntarily.
Best thing that ever happened to me was getting banned off Twatter in October of 2019. (after a decade and 30 poasts, no less!)
It was delicious that I got to refuse the "Come back to X" message that arrived in my mailbox after Musk took over and offered to reinstate the banned accounts.
Thanks, Elon, but no.
I'd rather have a root canal w/o anaesthesia.