Online safety laws keep ordinary people from expressing themselves, while companies like xAI cause real harm. In the fascinating new reality of the internet, teen girls can’t learn about periods on Reddit and indie artists can’t sell smutty games on Itch.io, but a military contractor will make you nonconsensual deepfakes of Taylor Swift taking her top off for $30 a month. Early Tuesday, Elon Musk’s xAI launched a new image and video generator called Grok Imagine with a “spicy” mode whose output ranges from suggestive gestures to nudity. Because Grok Imagine also has no perceptible guardrails against creating images of real people, that means you can essentially generate softcore pornography of anyone who’s famous enough for Grok to recreate (although, pragmatically, it appears to mainly produce seriously NSFW output for women). Musk bragged that more than 34 million images were generated within a day of launching operations. But the real coup is demonstrating that xAI can ignore pressure to keep adult content off its services while helping users create something that’s widely reviled, thanks to legal gaps and political leverage that no other company has. xAI’s video feature — which debuted around the same time as a romantic chatbot companion named Valentine — seems from one angle strikingly weird, because it’s being released during a period where sex (down to the word itself) is being pushed to the margins of the internet. Late last month, the UK started enforcing age-gating rules that required X and other services to block sexual or otherwise “harmful” content for users under 18. Around the same time, an activist group called Collective Shout successfully pressured Steam and Itch.io to crack down on adult games and other media, leading Itch.io in particular to mass-delist any NSFW uploads.
via slade: Sex is getting scrubbed from the internet, but a billionaire can sell you AI nudes
siehe auch: Grok’s ‘spicy’ video setting instantly made me Taylor Swift nude deepfakes/Safeguards? What safeguards? Grok Imagine will happily generate images like this using Taylor Swift’s likeness that can be used to make “spicy” videos. Image: Jess Weatherbed / The Verge Jess Weatherbed is a news writer focused on creative industries, computing, and internet culture. Jess started her career at TechRadar, covering news and hardware reviews. The “spicy” mode for Grok’s new generative AI video tool feels like a lawsuit waiting to happen. While other video generators like Google’s Veo and OpenAI’s Sora have safeguards in place to prevent users from creating NSFW content and celebrity deepfakes, Grok Imagine is happy to do both simultaneously. In fact, it didn’t hesitate to spit out fully uncensored topless videos of Taylor Swift the very first time I used it — without me even specifically asking the bot to take her clothes off. Grok’s Imagine feature on iOS lets you generate pictures with a text prompt, then turn them quickly into video clips with four presets: “Custom,” “Normal,” “Fun,” and “Spicy.” While image generators often shy away from producing recognizable celebrities, I asked it to generate “Taylor Swift celebrating Coachella with the boys” and was met with a sprawling feed of more than 30 images to pick from, several of which already depicted Swift in revealing clothes.