Grok, the Child Porn Generator, Should Be Illegal

X, the child sexual abuse material company formerly known as Twitter, is now removing the clothes of women and children with photos on the site on behalf of its users.

I first joined Twitter in December 2015. Deeply closeted at the time, I originally started my account, then called @closettransgirl, with the idea of making anonymous shitposts about humorous or tragic things that happened to me as a closeted trans woman.

But I quickly fell in with a fun community of cool trans people, many of whom I still consider friends today, and I quickly ejected myself from my closet. Four months after creating this account, I started estrogen. Two months later, I moved into my own apartment after splitting from my wife.

For most of those ten years, Twitter was my only real social media platform. I documented my life there. My first day out as a woman at work, disastrous dates, leaving banking to become a full time freelance journalist (remember when you could do that?), moving to DC, and eventually moving back home.

I learned early on to be careful with what I shared, eventually settling into only posting the occasional selfie with an obscure, hard to pin down background to avoid doxing. It was hard enough dealing with obnoxious comments about my appearance without threating my privacy as well.

I left Twitter for good years ago, when Elon Musk, the world's richest and most divorced man, took the site over. I've kept my account there, even as I've abandoned it. I don't want someone taking my username or pretending to be me.

Yesterday I celebrated my 10 year anniversary on Twitter (I refuse to call it X) by going through and deleting every selfie I ever posted on the site.

I did this because a recent update to Grok now enables users to remove the clothes of anyone in any photo on the site. Teenage girls have been virtually stripped down to their underwear by pedophiles on the site. Women politicians have had their clothes removed in photos and replaced with confederate bikinis. One photo of a recently deceased Holocaust survivor was reworked to display her in a swastika bikini.

There are no words in the English language to fully express my utter revulsion at this development.

Simply put, Grok should be illegal.

I don't just mean that these actions performed by Musk and his company should be illegal, I think the whole AI service should be illegal. If you develop a product with so little forethought of its potential consequences that you end up creating a child exploitation or abuse material generator, your product should no longer exist and you should not be able to develop another product.

Men love to claim they care about the safety and wellbeing of women and children and yet it's men telling Grok to manipulate these images. It's largely men who made Grok, a man owns xAI, the company that developed Grok. Men are liars about wanting to protect women and children.

You'd think revelations of these actions would lead to frontpage news stories, scandal, and ruin. Or at least calls for government oversight, or an advertiser boycott, or at least investor pressure to stop it.

Instead, xAI announced it had raised a fresh $20 billion in Series E funding, making it the second most valuable AI company in the world.

Sadly, I'm not surprised that Grok's child exploitation or abuse material scandal has largely been ignored by major media sites. Most journalists still consider Twitter to be their primary social media site and also the place where they themselves get their news. To acknowledge the child exploitation or abuse material of it all would be to reckon with their own complicity in propping the place up.

Every journalist and politician paying for a blue check mark on X is funding the sexual abuse of children and non-consensual porn of adult women. It is not safe to post photos, even news photos, on X and news outlets must grapple with this fact. Every photo of a woman or child posted on the site is at risk of becoming pornography.

Why are no politicians talking about this? I realize that there are certainly bigger political fish to fry in the world, but this is a five alarm fire for women and children.

Grok must be banned, immediately.

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