What a Grok of $h!t

Why is the Australian Federal Government neither demanding nor taking urgent action

on Grok and X, which have, in recent weeks, been identified as some of the largest disseminators of child sexual abuse material in the world?

In case you’ve missed it, Grok, an AI chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s company xAI, and now hardwired into his social media platform X (formerly Twitter), has recently been revealed to have been misused on a wide scale to generate sexually explicit and non-consensual AI-generated imagery of both women and minors.

When alerted to the problem, xAI (and by extension Musk, it’s founder and CEO) did little or nothing to counter it, leading to widespread accusations that the company was not only producing, but actively monetising harmful content by specifically restricting image generation to paid subscribers, which critics argued, understandably enough, was both insufficient and exploitative.

Interestingly, the most forthright government responses to date have not come from western countries, but from the likes of Malaysia and Indonesia.

Malaysia’s Communications and Multimedia Commission almost immediately announced legal action against both X and xAI, citing violations of national content and cybercrime laws, particularly those related to the dissemination of sexualised images involving minors.

Indonesia went further, and temporarily blocked access to Grok.

Moving considerably more slowly, the UK’s telecom and media regulator Ofcom launched an investigation into X and Grok “to determine whether it had breached the Online Safety Act.”  In other words, UK lawmakers are not sure if using a global platform with a reach of some 557 million to disseminate child sexual abuse material is illegal in their jurisdiction or not, and need to investigate the matter in slow time before they come to a conclusion. 

Sir Jimmy Saville would clearly be voting for Sir Keir Starmer, were he still alive

and abusing children today. Knights of the realm have to stick together, after all.

Interestingly, overnight, xAI has offered, not to remove the content in the UK, but to mask it so that it cannot be seen in that jurisdiction.  That rather begs the question, in what jurisdiction does Musk and his cronies think it is acceptable to share child exploitation imagery, doesn’t it?

Meanwhile, Canada has given its nearest neighbour a polite warning that, rather than actively investigating (which might have been considered the lowest of benchmarks), it will consider a possible RCMP investigation. 

It apparently takes a while for the now-aging Constable Benton Fraser to pull on

his snow boots, but thank you kindly for the chance to at least think about being of service.

(Constable Benton Fraser is clearly not as young, nor yet as speedy as he used to be.)

Low benchmarks aside, Australia’s reaction to date has been … crickets.  The most we’ve been able to squeeze out of our enabling politicians is that they will monitor overseas regulatory action.  They won’t monitor X.  They won’t issue any sanctions under the Online Safety Act 2021.  But hey, they’ll keep one eye on what other countries and jurisdictions are doing, or at least thinking about doing, and they'll doubtless keep the other eye firmly on any negative reaction to such responses on the part of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Washington.

And all of this on the watch of a US Executive whose President has been found guilty by a duly constituted court of sexual abuse, and who appears to all intents and purposes to be more concerned with distracting his domestic population from any involvement he might have had with convicted sex offender Jeffery Epstein, than he is with policing the platforms owned by his good friend Mr Musk.

Trump’s own response?  He has opted to frame the dissemination of online child abuse material as the latest in a series of culture-war disputes, rather than something that needs to be regulated, or tried at law.  As a result, the world’s largest dissemination of CSAM remains comfortably beneath the wing of the American Federal Government, and essentially free from prosecution.

Nothing to see here, folks.  Just some clothes that have disappeared from a few thousand online pictures, and we’ve locked those away behind a paywall, so that we still make a nice healthy profit, and no one can see who is looking at what. 

What do you mean, cover up??  This is Freedom, man, with a capital F you – it’s the American Way!

CB