Elon Musks Degradation Engine

Swarm Gaze, industrialized

On my Substack, i wrote a piece on the abysmal situation of automatized sexual harassment on X (Si apre in una nuova finestra) through Groks image-edit feature that immediately turned into a nudifying app, here’s the initial section about what transpired over the holidays:

The Swarm Gaze goes Mainstream

Over the holidays, Elon Musk flipped a switch (Si apre in una nuova finestra) and allowed for user images to be edited by xAI’s Grok-model, raising concerns about unauthorized edits and misuse from artists and photographers. Things got out of hand almost immediately: People on X used the feature to generate sexualized images of users, including teenage girls and minors (Si apre in una nuova finestra), and in some cases those sexualized images included depictions of incest, violence and homicide (Si apre in una nuova finestra). Nonconsensual AI-porn is nothing new on Musks X --horrible enough--, but implementing it as a feature of the platform is (Si apre in una nuova finestra).

The implementation of a AI-nudifying as a feature on X scales the problem from being a somewhat limited phenomenon to industrial size on a mainstream platform. From Reuters (Si apre in una nuova finestra):

A review of public requests sent to Grok over a single 10-minute-long period at midday U.S. Eastern Time on Friday tallied 102 attempts by X users to use Grok to digitally edit photographs of people so that they would appear to be wearing bikinis. (...) Grok fully complied with such requests in at least 21 cases, Reuters found, generating images of women in dental-floss-style or translucent bikinis and, in at least one case, covering a woman in oil. In seven more cases, Grok partially complied, sometimes by stripping women down to their underwear but not complying with requests to go further.

At the time of writing, this is still going on with “21 realized cases within 10 minutes” for two weeks now. You can do the math yourself.

With this major tech scandal going on, it also doesn’t help when journalism fails to adress the real problem --a major platform owned by a powerful billionaire implementing a nudifying feature mainstreaming the pornification of women--, and instead cutifies it by anthropomorphizing the chatbot. Parker Molloy sums it up: Grok Can’t Apologize. Grok Isn’t Sentient. So Why Do Headlines Keep Saying It Did? (Si apre in una nuova finestra).

Musk responsed (Si apre in una nuova finestra) to all of this with his usual public disregard of civilizatory standards: “🤣”, while one genius (Si apre in una nuova finestra) on X, answering to the question “why is this allowed?” with “girl realizes uploading pictures of herself publicly online comes with risk! 😱”, unintentionally confirmed years of feminist writings about being a woman on the internet.

And exactly while all of this systematic abuse was unfolding, Elon Musk went dining with the pussygrabber-in-chief (Si apre in una nuova finestra) claiming that “2026 is going to be amazing”. In light of these events, and everything that happened before, this can only be read as a threat.

You can read the whole post here: Elon Musks Degradation Engine - Swarm Gaze, industrialized (Si apre in una nuova finestra).