Downing Street has condemned the move by X to restrict its AI image creation tool to paying subscribers as insulting, saying it simply made the ability to generate explicit and unlawful images a premium service.
There has been widespread anger after the image tool for Grok, the AI element of X, was used to manipulate thousands of images of women and sometimes children to remove their clothing or put them in sexual positions.
Or even, don’t be such a Cnut.
The tool is out there, the ability to do this exists. It’s not limited to any one platform, there are open source equivalents and so on. OK, maybe the open source is a generation – 6 months say – behind but it’ll undoubtedly get there. A tide that simply cannot be commanded to recede.
Moreover a tool with the likely secondly most common use being by women seeing how different outfits look on them. The obvious most common use, being men seeing how the women look out of them.
First five minutes of “Clueless” to be BANNED!!!11!!!!!
Musk has already said it’s illegal to use Grok that way and you can’t be anonymous as a paying member so he can now police it.
Job done.
Of course this isn’t about whether or not Musk has solved that problem this is about the continued attempts to either shut X down or put the Woke back in charge.
As with ‘man made climate change’ we really cannot stop it, but that won’t deter the control freaks (Millibrain) or grifters (Dale Vince) from pushing it for all they are worth.
My attempts to declothe Greta Thunberg have so far proved fruitless.
I keep getting messages “All Our Servers are Busy. Please Try Later” “IP logged” and “All your base are belong to us.”
I wish I could de-read that, Mrs Grist is doing eggs and bacon but now I don’t feel very well…
I use Grok Imagine a lot and it constantly moderates even the most seemingly innocuous prompts, so I don’t believe it is creating pornographic images.
On the other hand, if anyone were to find ways around that moderation, I’d put my money on people in search of pornographic images, invented or otherwise.
The solution is simple. Elon becomes a gay Muslim, somehow evades a fatwa, and pays for some young Ukranian male models to become part of the coalition of the Willies in a flat in Covent Garden.
Oh, and don’t forget the HIV test on the NHS. It’s free for non-residents and it’s just one quick little prick according to Sir Keir…
The government, being overawed by the serious matters that need its attention, has decided to grab headlines by legislating on footling matters.
SOP.
This stuff upsets him I ‘spec…
You would think he would like something that aids his assertions that those photos “could” both be fakes.
You heard the prime minister yesterday. He was abundantly clear that X needs to act, and needs to act now. It is time for X to grip this issue.
I think it took me less than 10 seconds, even with the Hamster keeping Forum destroying genius that was this administration’s ’Online Safety Act’ to find around page related to adult websites that gave around 40 to 50 options and that’s on page 1 of DuckDuck go. In the wilds that are pages 4 and 5 or even beyond who the f%^k knows what is out there and that’s just on the normal web.
I can’t help but be reminded of the immortal words of ‘Kim jong Il’ from the film ‘Team America World Police’
As Bloke in North Dorset points out, this has absolutely fuck all to do with whether or not you can change some bird to look naked or whatever, it’s about stopping access to X because of all the information that is on there.
There are other resources for this – as if it was anyway a real problem – like ChatGPT, but they’re not being threatened with closure, are they?
Starmer – like the Ayatollahs, and Buckteeth ‘we are your single point of truth’ Horseface in NZ, and all of the others, are terrified of their inability to control the narrative, and of our ability to see all the anti-state, anti-blob, and anti-wanker truth.
Admittedly, there’s 100x the shite on X, too, but panners don’t mind sifting through the garbage to get 1% of gold.
Relatedly, Italy has just fined Cloudflare 14.2 million euros, supposedly for ‘refusing to block access to pirate sites’.
Cloudflare has said in response that it will remove all of its servers from Italian cities, and withdraw its offer to provide security for the forthcoming Winter Olympics.
Again, fuck all to do with the fig leaf, it’s about the demand that Cloudflare close access to any website anywhere in the world within 30 minutes of notification of ‘piracy’.
Meanwhile, in America ♥️♥️
“There has been widespread anger ..”
Excellent. Do it to them more!
Actually the technology cannot do that. It can only make a facsimile of what a person may look like naked. It is simply an advancement on cutting the head out of a photo and glueing on a naked body cut from a jazz mag.
And it doesn’t matter. We’ve had Photoshopping for decades. It’s not hard to Photoshop Kate’s face onto a porn star and make it look superficially convincing. It just takes time and some skill. Being able to do the equivalent cheaply to moving image is relatively new, but it’s been done expensively in Hollywood for decades.
Digital manipulation spelled the end of photographic veracity. Grok is merely hammering nails into the coffin. If you find a picture of a naked Kate sucking pork the correct response is: “Really?” And then move on.
Sure, but this is a desperately unpopular government and the country is simultaneously bankrupt and turbofucked by govt regulations and policies they won’t resile from.
Their shrunken base now disproportionately comprises gullible, extremely online, university miseducated, childless women who fret about the Current Thing because they’re NPCs who literally have nothing better in their lives.
So, ginning up an immoral panic against African Man is one of the few things they have left to offer. (Like abortion up to 9 months). It doesn’t cost any money and there’s always the chance Elon will take drugs again and then the bait because he’s a bit of a sperg.
It’s a bullshit, three ring, circus sideshow of…
Manipulating photos using PhotoShop to produce porno images has been around for sometime. No calls to ban it.
Suddenly – AI can do it without the user having to learn to do it, and – horror – Grok is owned by Elon Musk.
It is all about “get Musk”.
Pretty sure that when you ‘shop someone else’s mug on a “glamour/porn model and publish that for commercial or nefarious gain, there’s already a fair amount of Official No-No’s regardnig that particular practice.
Fines and possible jailtime , depending on….
Then again, I’ve never heard of Adobe being sued/warned/sternly lettered for that particular use of their toolset.
Well, except a couple of Offended employing Ambulance Chasers in the US, land of the Hamster-Microwave warning labels..
Definitely not “in principle”, where Adobe would be *required* to make it impossible to ‘shop those images ( somehow…..) in theirToolset to begin with.
Or allow others to import/create macro’s/filters to do exactly that. ( The same crowd would be crowing Monopolism™ !!! within a heartbeat…..)
Firmly established in jurisprudence that it’s the *USE* that’s a potential crime, not the Tools used. Especially when that particular use has already been *mitigated* by the provider of those tools.
And these ninnies try to go against that… Dunno what Downing 10 uses for Legal Counsel, but their incompetence is only exceeded by their inflated paychecks…
If you ‘shop someone else’s mug on a “glamour/porn model” and publish that for commercial or nefarious gain you’re infringing copyright. It’s established on both sides of the pond that toolsets cannot either own or infringe copyright, only their operators can. It’s also established that AI output cannot be copyright. The only recourse is that the AI provider trained the tool on copyright images without permission from their rightsholders, as most have been.
You can use a wheelbrace to remove a wheel from your car. You can also use it to steal a wheel from someone else’s, or brain its owner if he disturbs you doing it. Are we to ban wheelbraces? No, we punish thieves, GBH and murderers.
Thing is, and I may be wrong, AIUI there’s no direct law against rendering and publishing Kate in a bikini. In fact one can argue that it falls under the Parody exception in UK copyright law, an exception explicitly demanded by the Progressive blob, academia and Google.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/exceptions-to-copyright#parody-caricature-and-pastiche
I think I found the flaw in your assertion.
This is like cities here in the US suing auto manufacturers for making it too easy to steal their cars. It’s causing their vibrant but impetuous youth to be arrested too often.
Dear Mr Worstall
In next week’s news, Sir iKier demands W H Smith’s oversee the use of all paper and crayons purchased from their stores. And paints. And brushes. And scraper boards. And scrapers.
DP
Downing Street has condemned the move by X to restrict its AI image creation tool to paying subscribers. Elon Musk trembles in his shoes & monogrammed pure silk black pyjamas. “No! No! I have been found guilty by the Highest Authority. I shall repent & throw myself on its mercy”
I’ve been able to make mucky fake pictures of people with Paint Shop Pro since 1997.
I’ve been able to make mucky fake pictures of people with a magazine and a pair of scissors, pen, pencil, paper, crayons since 1980.
I found a jizz mag behind some garages when I was about 10 with some line drawing strip cartoons that were clearly “Spidey-Man” rogering Margaret Thatcher. I expect the only concern was using the name “Spidey-Man” to avoid a copyright/trademark challenge.
If you can make a balloon that looks like Donald Trump in a diaper, you make images that look like [ insert politician or celebrity here ] in a revealing swimsuit, or in a birthday suit.
Better it should be free to anyone?
At least with the paying subscribers there’s a chance to control it.
Ask F2P games how they manage account bans – they don’t.
Funny you mention F2P games… They’ve actually got this whole thing already figured out over the past 2 decades.
They’ve “perfected” the balance between their F2P play and the Premium stuff in such a way that you can do Decent on F2P, but need to shell out dough if you want to be one of the Big Boys.
The balance between fun Timewaster and Serious Play.
AI will eventually hit that balance as well.. Free Use for amateur/occasional use with dimished option, with Premium and Business tiers for professional use.
Really nothing new…
As for account bans in games…. You either need to be involved in RMT ( if the game is even suited for that particular type of ….business…) , or outright hack/abuse any API they have, or do some major bug abuse.
And then the Admins merely *poof* everything you had. No Mercy, No recourse.
Most outfits don’t even care about bots/macros anymore. They simply added enough lag/RNG to the game response to confuddle the Haxxor Script Kiddies.
The decent bots that allow for this are so close to actual “human interaction” that their net gain is negligible. Other than that they don’t tire, but *that* is easily monitored..
More of an exercise for real/student programmers than anything else nowadays.
It all has sort of plateau’d out and ….settled…