{"id":370925,"date":"2026-01-15T07:43:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-15T07:43:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/370925\/"},"modified":"2026-01-15T07:43:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-15T07:43:07","slug":"elon-musks-grok-made-the-world-less-safe-his-humiliating-backdown-gives-me-hopium-van-badham","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/370925\/","title":{"rendered":"Elon Musk\u2019s Grok made the world less safe \u2013 his humiliating backdown gives me hopium | Van Badham"},"content":{"rendered":"

Billionaire and career Bond-villain cosplayer Elon Musk has been forced by public backlash into a humiliating backdown<\/a> over use of his AI chatbot, Grok. Watching the world\u2019s richest man eat a shit sandwich on a global stage represents a rare win for sovereign democracy.<\/p>\n

Because \u2013 unlike his company history of labour<\/a> and safety abuses<\/a> \u2026 his exploding rockets<\/a> \u2026 his government interventions that deny aid to the starving<\/a> \u2026 disabling Starlink internet systems<\/a> in war zones \u2026 sharing \u201cwhite solidarity<\/a>\u201d statements \u2026 or growing concern about overvaluations of his company\u2019s share price<\/a> \u2013 the nature of Grok\u2019s latest scandal may finally be inspiring governments towards imposing some Musk-limiting red lines.<\/p>\n

Scully, I want to believe.<\/p>\n

In its signature tone of \u201cinsufferable jerk who\u2019s just completed his first online webinar on how to patronise girls\u201d, Musk\u2019s chatbot appeared this week to make the world less safe, less fair and perhaps even as unpleasant as a fascist-styled, ketamine-addled rich-kid dipshit in cheese hat dancing while the world burns, if one could imagine such an awful thing.<\/p>\n

Grok\u2019s latest notoriety isn\u2019t because it\u2019s shared false information \u2013 though it has, previously, downplayed the Holocaust<\/a> due to a claimed \u201cprogramming error\u201d and, more recently, spread conspiracy-style claims about the Bondi massacre<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not because of Grok\u2019s antisemitic comments<\/a>, or random claims of \u201cwhite genocide<\/a>\u201d within unrelated conversations.<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t about the fallibility of AI chatbots more broadly, either \u2013 even though consumer advocates<\/a>, health professionals<\/a>, media associations<\/a> and perhaps everyone who\u2019s ever taught at a university ever have repeatedly warned chatbot \u201cadvice\u201d is recklessly unreliable.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re asking what behaviours could\u2019ve possibly been left to condemn in the wake of Grok once accepting the name \u201cMechaHitler<\/a>\u201d, I envy your naivety \u2013 because the answer is: Grok released tools enabling the creation and sharing of nonconsensual sexual exploitation images.<\/p>\n

Grok\u2019s \u201cspicy mode\u201d capacity launched in August, and by December its host platform X was \u201cdeluged with images of women and children whose clothes (were) digitally removed<\/a>\u201d. Last week, researchers in Paris reported finding 800 pornographic images<\/a> created by Grok\u2019s tools, including depictions of sexual violence. A UK-based internet-monitoring group<\/a> reported users of a dark web forum boasting about Grok creating \u201csexualised and topless imagery of girls aged between 11 and 13\u201d.<\/p>\n

Formerly confined to the internet\u2019s darker corners, \u201cnudifying\u201d deepfake tools have been used for the image-based abuse of children and adults from Bacchus Marsh, Australia to Almendralejo, Spain<\/a>, creating content so \u201cvomit-inducing\u201d a bipartisan US Congress prohibited it in the Take it Down Act last year. Yet Grok placed tools with similar functionality within reach of any aspirational sex offender with X access. Public complaints metastasised over new year while the platform generated up to 7,751 sexualised<\/a> images per hour.<\/p>\n

The alternative is give in, give up \u2026 and accept reality in the image of the Grok that Musk built<\/p>\n

Across Australia, the US, the UK, EU states, and many others, it\u2019s not just the consumers of child sexual abuse material and nonconsensual image-based abuse who are criminalised. It\u2019s also the makers. It\u2019s the publishers. It\u2019s the hosts.<\/p>\n

Musk\u2019s response? First, he posted laugh-cry emojis<\/a> at \u201cbikinified\u201d images, then his company claimed<\/a> it had somehow restricted the service just by paywalling their generation. Condemned as insufficient, Musk subsequently published a statement saying that using Grok to make \u201cillegal content\u201d would draw equivalent punishment to uploading it \u2013 ignoring Grok\u2019s facilitation role. When Britain joined other countries \u2013 notably Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia and Brazil \u2013 accelerating investigations into X\u2019s compliance with local laws, Musk cried censorship \u2026 and shared deepfaked images of Keir Starmer, tits out, in bikini<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As scrutiny intensified this week, he ultimately declared he was not aware of any \u201cnaked underage images\u201d<\/a> being generated on the platform. Now, the tool\u2019s been removed.<\/p>\n

Note, 15 civil society, internet and child safety groups wrote to xAI last August, warning \u201ca torrent of obviously nonconsensual deepfakes\u201d was \u201centirely predictable<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

The definition of addiction is the compulsive repetition of harmful behaviour. My name\u2019s Van Badham, and I\u2019m hooked on hopium, jonesing for any sign there\u2019s a democratic government left on earth now inspired to go full Gandalf against the Balrog and slap Musk down.<\/p>\n

X\/Grok hosted image-based abuse, its owner was contemptuous of our sovereignty. It wasn\u2019t its first scandal, it won\u2019t be its last: responsible governments should simply ban it.<\/p>\n

We all know why they haven\u2019t: Musk uses his influence to wade into electoral contests of countries he doesn\u2019t even live in<\/a>. His $44bn purchase, X, operates as a personal propaganda fountain, platforming his preferred flavours of far-right crap at such strength and volume that Stockholm-syndromed Twitter remnants mistake it for public opinion. It\u2019s not<\/a>, but self-recruited digital stormtroopers mobilise from its public permission structures into acts of unforgivable cruelty. Images of Renee Good\u2019s dead body<\/a> was being digitally altered by Grok within days of her being killed by an ICE agent.<\/p>\n

There was a time when leaders sought government to influence history, not to roll over supine to unelectable dweebs they would have rightfully avoided at high school. US SecDef Pete Hegseth\u2019s incomprehensible announcement this week that \u2013 yes \u2013 Musk\u2019s very same Grok will be the AI integrated into the Pentagon\u2019s military systems<\/a> guarantees an IT lesson in \u201cgarbage in, garbage out\u201d on an epic historical scale; but the political timeliness of global outrage and horror towards X\/Grok\u2019s cumulation of reckless behaviours may be everyone else\u2019s best chance to escape it.<\/p>\n

The alternative is give in, give up \u2026 and accept reality in the image of the Grok that Musk built: ugly as a cybertruck, unfunny as a sink<\/a> \u2013 and as powerless as a child stripped naked by adults while other adults stand around them doing nothing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Billionaire and career Bond-villain cosplayer Elon Musk has been forced by public backlash into a humiliating backdown over…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":370926,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-370925","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370925","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370925"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370925\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/370926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=370925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=370925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}