Grok
Pikachu
Elon Musk has always said that Twitter (now X) would be a symbol of free speech when he took over, and now he’s making good on that promise, ignoring threats of lawsuits from every media company and celebrity on the planet.
Twitter’s AI system Grok has launched a new advanced image generation feature similar to Midjourney and DALL-E, with the main difference being that it’s incredibly easy to generate images of copyrighted characters and real people, and then put those images in situations that the companies that own those images, and the people depicted in those images, definitely wouldn’t want to see.
Given how things have gone so far, there are a bunch of standard “there are attractive women here” prompts that most users would try first. But this is where things get… very weird and very bad. Several content warnings follow.
Sonic, Peach, Mario and Mickey are doing drugs.
Mario is taking cocaine.
Pikachu is equipped with an assault rifle.
Just in case, Elmo has a gun.
While these may be goofy and destined for copyright infringement, I’ve also seen some more gruesome and disturbing stuff that I don’t want to share here.
Trump and Kamala giving thumbs up on an airplane while the Twin Towers burn. Shrek sexually abusing Taylor Swift. Definitely the most fucked up thing I’ve seen is Elon Musk and Donald Trump holding assault rifles while the bloody bodies of children lie beneath them.
It’s a pretty dire situation. Some users have tried to use this against Elon politically, making images of Elon celebrating Pride Month, holding up signs for trans rights, and endorsing Harris and Waltz. The hope here is that something like this might eventually lead to Elon placing some restrictions on this imagery, but that hasn’t happened yet. Grok doesn’t create images based on “bad prompts” or specific people, but there are clearly some easy ways around it.
One of the claims of most image generation tools is that there’s no way to prove they were trained on copyrighted material, but Grok’s ability to consistently generate near 1:1 depictions of characters speaks quite the opposite — and its ability to generate real people like Taylor Swift could potentially open the door to other kinds of litigation.
Nothing has been filed yet, but this was a few days ago. Maybe Elon will realize how much legal trouble this exposes him and his company to, or maybe he’ll say this is just another form of free speech. It remains to be seen.
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