While Grok has introduced belated safeguards to prevent sexualised AI imagery, other tools have far fewer limits
“Since discovering Grok AI, regular porn doesn’t do it for me anymore, it just sounds absurd now,” one enthusiast for the Elon Musk-owned AI chatbot wrote on Reddit. Another agreed: “If I want a really specific person, yes.”
If those who have been horrified by the distribution of sexualised imagery on Grok hoped that last week’s belated safeguards could put the genie back in the bottle, there are many such posts on Reddit and elsewhere that tell a different story.
And while Grok has undoubtedly transformed public understanding of the power of artificial intelligence, it has also pointed to a much wider problem: the growing availability of tools, and means of distribution, that present worldwide regulators with what many view as an impossible task. Even as the UK announces that creating nonconsensual sexual and intimate images will soon be a criminal offence, experts say that the use of AI to harm women has only just begun.
I’m highly ambivalent about the use of AI for porn. On one hand it’s unequivocally bad when used to make porn or images of unwilling and unknowing people, doubly so when shared publicly and/or used maliciously.
OTOH it allows creation of whatever fetish or kink someone might have that might be difficult to deal with outside of fantsy and harms nobody so long as it remains contained.
I can’t get into the psychology of it, I’m not smart enough, I don’t know if casual use of such imagery bleeds over into real life problems. Obsessive use would obviously be a problem, but that would likely be a problem with or without AI.
Its not complicated, people want to have their cake and eat it too.
There’s no way to practice abusive things in isolation that will not affect you around other people. Its a stupid thing to want to figure out in the first place, in my opinion.