No woman or child should live in fear of having their image sexually manipulated by technology. Yet that is what many have faced in recent days with Grok.
The technology to do this exists. The technology is not exclusive to Grok. There are open source AIs that can do this – perhaps not as well but that’s only a matter of time. We’re in Cnut territory therefore.
Liz Kendall is the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology
A thousand years and they’ve still not got the message.
Technocrats love technology when it gives power to them. Show them anything that doesn’t and they turn into raging Luddites.
You can run something similar on any high end graphics card, or rent GPU time for a few quid an hour. But facts don’t really matter when there’s a moral panic to arrange.
We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.
Lord Macaulay (1800-59)
Yet even now when you google for images of famous American inventors one ethnicity dominates (and it doesn’t include Eddison). That’s ok apparently.
Shock! Horror! “Yes, you can use this to shut it down, sir. No one will work out the true reason and you’ll look really good!” “Thanks McSweeny! Brilliant idea! Don’t forget to send Waheed that email about blocking the inquiry and the one to Huw saying how much we enjoyed his latest one!”
I am guessing the future victims of ISiS or its Grooming gang proxies, or even of Big Trans, will be thanking their lucky stars that this government was on the proverbial
Ball…..
Well, Liz Kendall. Need I say more?
Liz Kendall is the Secretary of State for Science, Hysteria, Innovation and Technology
See wot I mean?
Just a reminder that a former newsreader having pleaded guilty to charges of making indecent images of real children escaped prison and retained his taxpayer funded pension.
No person should live in fear of a newspaper being so incredibly stupid.
There is NFW a child could have such fear. They’d have no idea what it was. They’d never see it. An appeal to fear for a class that isn’t capable of that fear. We have nothing to fear but idiots.
But it is OK for women and children to live in fear of being raped by immigrants and some actually raped?
Priorities?
Even since I watched Terminator 2 with the liquid man I’ve always said I would doubt video evidence from then on. Perfect clarity and it is a lie yet CCTV are usually grainy and you can hardly see what is going on but it is accepted as irrefutable proof.
Technology has moved on decades since then and the genie is well out of the box. Government has tried and failed to ban real child porn which requires real children and perverts to make and the government and the general public still think that the government can help them stamp this out.
Soon, and I measure this in months, everyone with a computer will be able to run these apps on their own computers.
Banning X though is going to fix it. Funny how that is something that governments all over the world want to do.
“Soon, and I measure this in months, everyone with a computer will be able to run these apps on their own computers.”
You already can. It’s just software. But it runs a lot faster if you have a huge GPU.
So size does matter?
Just to confirm, there are laws, actual, existing and ready-to-use laws that can sort any tosser who wants to make these images. All you need is the willingness to use them.
But hey, that’s boring. If we can generate a CRISIS and declare there’s a big, bad American who MUST BE STOPPED….
African American
Oh.. the wrong sort…
We don’t need open source MS Paint will do it too, it just taKES MORE skill and time!!
A pair of scissors and two well chosen but legal photos is enough to produce an illegal image the possession of which would be a serious crime.
Musk has already made Grok the most secure LLM in the world against This Sort of Thing – every LLM can be talked into misuse but Grok image generation is restricted to paying subscribers so the cops can have the billing info of anyone who uses it for harassment. Gemini, Copilot, Claude etc. can’t say the same.
Obviously, that’s not enough because the Grooming Gangs Party just wants a distraction from how they’re the most hated government in British history and to pretend they haven’t already arranged for women and girls to be raped by Muslim asylum seekers. It’s all so tiresome.
But Musk should go further – remove Grok image generation access from the UK entirely, and add an automated Community Note to every tweet sent out by a Labour MP pointing out they’re the ones who took Grok from you.
I would LOVE to see that happen!
“There are open source AIs that can do this – perhaps not as well but that’s only a matter of time.”
There’s a dual use thing with open source. Nerds and small companies will use it for free. Companies pay for support. But the nerds are often spotting bugs, contributing back little fixes. It’s a symbiotic thing. And it often leads to it being better software. Not many companies are still on the old Sun Sparc UNIX boxes. They ditched them for Linux on X86. Apple Mac OS and iOS are fundamentally BSD UNIX. Android is based on Linux (and open source itself).
From what I understand the open source models are there or there abouts. And if you’ve got one that has face replacements, it’s not so much making the code work for porn as to take out the bits that stop you doing porn. The code probably even has a CheckForAdultRequest function and you just remove that and recompile. And if they won’t take it back, you fork it to a new model. There’s Qwen and LLaMa already.
“We’re in Cnut territory therefore.”
Don’t think this is correct. Cnut was perfeclty aware he could not stop the tide and his stunt on the beach was to show the faithful that he was not omnipotent. This bint and the hapless Labour tribe thinks she is and they are.
But she is a cnut
We’ve been able to do this since the days of cutting a head off one picture and pasting it to another.
But notice that these people still defend grooming gangs.
Lucy Powell MP (Labour, natch): “Oh, we want to blow that little trumpet now, do we? Yeah, OK, let’s get that dog whistle …”
Fear is a feeling. It’s in your head. When people complain about fear they are taking a dangerous path. One way to remove fear is through decption – you might be in serious danger, but you won’t fear it because you don’t know about it, so complaining about fear suggests that people should be deceived. But many fears are either not grounded in reality (abduction by aliens in flying saucers) or significantly exaggerated. The fear is not the problem – it’s the misunderstanding of reality. Again, the emphasis on fear leads to bad solutions.
And, of course, sometimes the fear is perfectly rational. Soldiers may fear being shot by the enemy. Here the solution is courage. This is also the case where someone learns that they have a terminal illness, or even realises that death is inevitable for everyone and fears death in general.
So if you suffer from fear either face it courageously, dismiss it as irrational (or get therapy etc), or convert it into a reasonable complaint about objective risk and get the risk addressed – leaving out the special pleading about your mental state.