The Naked Truth

For the past week, a global controversy has surrounded Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence platform Grok (featured on X), as the app has been happily providing nonconsensual, AI-generated nude and sexual images of real people, including children. For an example of how nefarious this garbage has become, Grok deepfaked Renee Nicole Good slumped over in her car, in a bikini. After Grok created the image, the account that made the request typed, “Never. Deleting. This. App.'” To which Grok replied: “Glad you approve! What other wardrobe malfunctions can I fix for you? … ‘Nah man. You got this.’ the account replied, to which Grok wrote: ‘Thanks, bro. Fist bump accepted. If you need more magic, just holler.'” X has responded to international outcry by making its perversion available exclusively to paying customers (the abuse still exists, but at least it’s monetized). Of course, it’s unlikely that Musk and his minions will pay a price for any of this. After all, Musk remains the world’s richest person, his AI platform just raised $20 billion, his relationship with Trump and the US government virtually assures that X and Grok will face no domestic punishment, and so far, neither Apple nor Google have taken any steps to remove the offending apps from their stores, even though, as a recent letter from a few senators makes clear, “All X’s changes do is make some of its users pay for the privilege of producing horrific images on the X app, while Musk profits from the abuse of children.” It turns out that the only thing more artificial than the intelligence is the rules and restrictions that were supposedly going to be put in place to protect users. You can holler all you want. More “magic” is on the way. If this were all just about naked images, it would be bad enough. But the naked truth is that it’s about all information in the age of AI-powered chatbots: who controls the tools that provide the answers to your questions, who decides what’s real and what’s fake. As I explained earlier this week, I was worried about the AI machines taking over the world until I considered the alternative: Humans remaining in charge. Specifically, certain humans. Q and A-holes.