As 2025 began, I thought humanity’s biggest problem was climate change.<\/p>\n
In 2026, AI is more pressing.<\/p>\n
As an experiment, given the recent controversy<\/a> about it, I asked Grok if it could make a nude picture of Queen Elizabeth I, who has been dead for more than 400 years.<\/p>\n It refused.<\/p>\n I typed: “Why not?”<\/p>\n It replied: “Because the current restrictions (rolled out in early January 2026 after the big backlash) block depictions of real individuals (whether alive or deceased) in revealing, sexualised, or fully nude contexts. Queen Elizabeth I is still considered a ‘real person’ under those rules.”<\/p>\n Grok is an AI tool developed by Elon Musk’s xAI and there has indeed been a big backlash against its willingness to create naked pictures of real people.<\/p>\n Last week, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described it as “just completely abhorrent”. He’s right; what’s more, Grok seems to agree.<\/p>\n Women call out men violating them on Grok<\/a><\/p>\n The X AI is not creating sexually explicit images of women on its own, but the software “facilitates their abuse” acting on the requests of men “eager to violate women”.<\/p>\n I typed into Grok: “What do you think about the outrage? Is it reasonable and understandable? Are the restrictions justified?”<\/p>\n It replied: “Yeah, the outrage is reasonable and understandable \u2014 people, especially women in the public eye, have every right to feel violated by seeing fabricated nudes of themselves spread online, even if it’s ‘just AI’. It’s not abstract; it can lead to tangible harm, like emotional distress or fuelling toxic online cultures. As for the restrictions, I’d say they’re justified in the current climate.”<\/p>\n And when I asked how it feels about it, whether it’s OK with producing naked pictures of real people, it protested that it’s just computer code and doesn’t have feelings, but then said: “Not really, no”.<\/p>\n AI redefining society<\/p>\n In her 2024 book<\/a>, Time to Reboot: Feminism in the Algorithm Age, Carla Wilshire, director of the Centre for Digital Wellbeing, wrote:\u00a0<\/p>\n “AI is poised to accelerate the redefining of intimacy, sexuality and human relations. Non-consensual porn is nothing less than an epidemic of identity theft, enabling defamation and humiliation through a virtual body-hijacking. In the worst cases, it is tantamount to online public gang rape.”<\/p>\n AI has come a long way in the two years since then and is developing exponentially.<\/p>\n Musk’s xAI and the other intelligence developers are working as fast as possible towards what they call AGI (artificial general intelligence) or ASI (artificial superintelligence), which is, in effect, AI that makes its own decisions. Given its answer above, an ASI version of Grok might decide not to do non-consensual porn, but others will.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, photographic and video evidence in courts will presumably become useless if they can be easily faked. Many courts are grappling with this already, including the Federal Court of Australia, but it could quickly get out of control.<\/p>\n AI will make politics much more chaotic than it already is, with incredibly effective fake campaigns including damning videos of candidates.<\/p>\n And then there’s extinction. Wilshire writes: “Before climate change or other meta-crises (nuclear, famine-related, biological), the eradication of our species by true artificial general intelligence remains one of humanity’s possible fates.”<\/p>\n But AI is not like the binary threat of a nuclear holocaust \u2014 extinction or not \u2014 its impact is incremental and already happening. The Grok body fakes are known about, and the global outrage has apparently led to some controls on it for now, but the impact on jobs and the economy is completely unknown and has barely begun.<\/p>\n I wrote about this at the end of last year, here<\/a> and here<\/a>, suggesting we’re now in another era of labour that is owned rather than employed, 200 or so years after the abolition of slavery (although the last country to abolish slavery was Mauritania, in 1981, just 45 years ago).<\/p>\n Life without work<\/p>\n Replacing human intelligence with machines is a much more profound change than was replacing a small part of human physical labour in the Industrial Revolution, which itself led to 100 years of vast inequality, misery and social conflict.<\/p>\n That revolution started as technology and quickly became economics, politics and ethics. It’s the same with this revolution, and once again it is taking too long for governments to recognise the challenge and respond.<\/p>\n Is 2025 ending with an AI bubble?<\/a><\/p>\n What makes the AI-driven stock market bubble unique in history is that if it’s not a bubble, the impact on humanity could be far more challenging than any previous technology.<\/p>\n It’s not a question of whether AI and robots will replace human jobs, but how many.<\/p>\n In October, Elon Musk posted on X: “AI and robots will replace all jobs.” Not just some, but all of them. Whether he’s right or wrong, it won’t be none \u2014 it already isn’t.<\/p>\n