For many years, credit card companies and other payment methods were aggressive about policing child sexual abuse material. Then, Elon Musk’s Grok started undressing children on X. The Center for Countering Digital Hate found 101 sexualized images of children as part of its sample of 20,000 images made by Grok from December 29th to January […]
Today’s episode of Decoder is about X, Grok, and Elon Musk. By now we’re several weeks into one of the worst, most upsetting, and most stupidly irresponsible AI controversies in the short history of generative AI. Grok, the chatbot made by Elon Musk’s xAI, is able to make all manner of AI-generated images, including nonconsensual […]
After launching almost three years ago, Meta’s Threads is now reportedly attracting more daily mobile users than rival platform X. According to Similarweb data shared by TechCrunch, Threads has 141.5 million daily active iOS and Android global app users as of January 7th, compared to 125 million users for Elon Musk’s mobile platform. Similarweb reports […]
On Friday morning, X and Grok went offline for users around the world on both the websites and apps. Outage reports began spiking on DownDetector around 10:00AM ET, while Cisco’s ThousandEyes outage map noted over 600 X servers around the world that were having problems. Attempts to load the site with either the Twitter.com or […]
In 2023, what was then still called Twitter, open-sourced at least portions of the code that decided what it served up in your feed. But that GitHub repository is hopelessly out of date, with the vast majority of the files appearing to be from the initial upload three years ago. Elon Musk says that in […]
X is suing music publishers and their trade group, the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA), accusing them of attempted coercion in their ongoing battle over licensing, as reported earlier by The Hollywood Reporter. The Elon Musk-owned platform accuses music publishers of colluding with the NMPA to “coerce X into taking licenses to musical works from […]
Since X’s users started using Grok to undress women and children using deepfake images, I have been waiting for what I assumed would be inevitable: X getting booted from Apple’s and Google’s app stores. The fact that it hasn’t happened yet tells me something serious about Silicon Valley’s leadership: Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are […]
The launch of an AI image editing feature on xAI’s Grok has caused chaos on X after it was used to generate a flood of nonconsensual sexualized deepfakes. As Hayden Field wrote, “screenshots show Grok complying with requests to put real women in lingerie and make them spread their legs, and to put small children […]
Elon Musk’s X has partially restricted access to Grok’s image editing capabilities amid growing backlash to the flood of nonconsensual, sexualized deepfakes of adults and minors generated by the platform. As of this writing, it no longer generates images as @grok replies for free, but Grok’s image editing tools remain readily available for any X […]
On Tuesday, the Trump Administration followed through on a threat of retaliation targeting foreigners who are involved in content moderation. The State Department announced sanctions barring US access for former EU commissioner Thierry Breton, as well as four researchers, while issuing an intentionally chilling threat to others, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio claiming, “The […]