But while it scores no points for nuance, there is something Grok Imagine is very good at: convincingly depicting real and recognisable women.
If, for example, you ask for Taylor Swift (which evidently many have), the system will do a convincing job because there are many images of the celebrity in its training data. For the same reason, Grok Imagine is good at evoking just about any woman well-known enough to have lots of images online, and notably poor at making images of men do anything sexy.
Multiple outlets have reported that Grok Imagine will quickly generate nude videos of celebrities including Taylor Swift.Credit: AP
It’s unclear what guardrails Spicy Mode has since xAI has not published them in detail. Some users have complained that they can’t get spicy results from photos they’ve uploaded to Grok, or that videos appear with blurring or censor bars. Yet others have shown videos of recognisable people fully nude. The Verge reported that, during its testing, the tool returned topless and nude videos of celebrities without the user even needing to specify that they should take their clothes off.
Until recently, Musk’s nude hyperreality is something that might have provoked a real outcry. But we’ve become so used to this behaviour from Musk and X (a platform many people who might have been bothered by this have already left), and so used to concerning AI applications, that it barely registers. I imagine some nations’ regulators may be looking at whether it breaks any rules, but that historically hasn’t bothered billionaires, and in America most companies seem to be falling in line with the conservative government’s priorities. For example, I don’t think there’s any real danger that Visa or Mastercard would consider refusing to process xAI subscriptions.
Some users have uploaded Spicy Mode AI-generated videos to X for public viewing.Credit:
To be clear, the problem I’m highlighting isn’t that there’s porn on the internet. That’s been the case for a long time and plenty of avenues are normal, healthy and ethical. The fact that Musk is selling nudes also isn’t the issue, although I’m sure the millions of creators on OnlyFans who’ve had their videos studied to create Grok Imagine would rather the cash go to them rather than a multibillionaire.
The risk here is an uncritical adoption of a technology that could soon begin to erode the importance of consent. A major platform is selling the ability to choose any prominent woman, or create one to your own specifications, and have them take their clothes off to become one-dimensional sexual objects in a single click. The platform might not be able to consistently fulfil that promise yet as it’s very janky, but occasional results are already spot-on, and it will only improve.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that the consumption of this content could impact a person’s concept of healthy boundaries and their respect for the personhood of others. It could distort their attitudes about how women do or should behave, which can be dangerous when applied to real life, especially in a situation where we can’t depend on government sex education to remain robust around the world. These kinds of consequences are why every other major AI company (for now) has guardrails on the kind of content it will generate.
While Musk obviously isn’t coding these features or training the AI himself, he’s clearly behind the direction of the product, and the fact that he doesn’t understand any of this or apply it to “Spicy Mode” and its generative output should surprise nobody.
This is the same man who, when Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris for US president, somehow took it as an act of playing hard to get directed at him personally, and publicly “offered” to impregnate the singer. More recently, he made a bizarre claim that women are trained by the media to hate white people, and followed it up by boosting an incredibly hateful reply saying women automatically reinforce the dominant culture because they’re “built to be traded” among tribes.
The idea that the head of a major company could say things like this in public with little scrutiny and no repercussions should be shocking, let alone if he’s one of the most prominent businesspeople on the planet. Businesses have been boycotted for less. But that’s the reality we’re in now.
And so we should likely expect that the world’s richest man’s $45-a-month non-consensual deepfake porn generator will continue to operate. Even while the conservative governments of the world continue to dismantle the majority of sex-related rights and education we’ve built over the past century.
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