Ireland joins regulator smackdown after X's Grok AI accused of undressing people The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) is the latest regulator to open an investigation into Elon Musk's X following repeated reports of harmful image generation by the platform's Grok AI chatbot. The DPC confirmed today it is launching the probe under section 110 of the Data Protection Act 2018. Officials said the …
... who is both disgusted by anyone even thinking that 'nudifying' software was 'a good idea', or troubled that at the end of an article about an at best highly dubious use of AI there is a link to:
"Sponsored: Unlocking the hidden power of unstructured data with AI"
There are shit heads who set out to make that specifically but, in the case of Grok, it's basically misuse of image touch up capabilities. "can you remove this ugly broach from my dress in this picture" is the same task as "can you remove my dress in this picture".
I don't know about others here, but I just don't get the point of AI photo editing. Perhaps it's because, when I take a picture of something, I want to record what I can see is actually there and not some machine-edited version of it. Who is going round taking pictures and then thinking, "I want to show this to someone, or post it on my 'socials', to show what I've been up to, but rather than showing what I've really been doing, I want to lie instead"?
I'm left thinking of the TV advert that is doing the rounds (I think it's for a Google phone) which asks the viewer whether they think they should allow their phone to reveal anything it "knows" about a person to their friends. I would have thought the answer to this, from most people, would be a resounding "Hell, no." I'll be the arbiter of what I tell my friends, thank you very much, not an "AI" on my phone which probably relies on sending all my personal data for processing to a data centre in the least regulated part of the US.
As for using "AI" to "touch-up" photographs to completely remove people's clothes, since an "AI" is just a statistical model based entirely on its training data, it stands to reason that it wouldn't have this capability unless it included such images in its training data. If it can be used to generate pornographic images of children, then I think there should be some very pointed questions being asked about how and why it is able to do this, and whether the owners of the model should be investigated more closely. Who thought that feeding images of naked people into image generation software that isn't specifically intended to generate other images of naked people, was a good idea?
I think the CSAM ingestion accusation is a bit of a stretch. Most diffusion models can generate fairly photographic images of clearly impossible things by bodging together known concepts (e.g. A pink elephant in a rice paddy or a Ferrari drawn in the style of Da Vinci).
As for the why of editing photos, the reasons are too broad to list but the phenomenon of people touching up photos is hardly unique to diffusion models and is as old as photography (have a look at why photoshop tools like dodge and burn have those icons).
I think the CSAM ingestion accusation is a bit of a stretch. Most diffusion models can generate fairly photographic images of clearly impossible things by bodging together known concepts (e.g. A pink elephant in a rice paddy or a Ferrari drawn in the style of Da Vinci).
To do these things, the model would have to have been training data that allowed it to identify an elephant, determine what colour pink is, have source material of rice paddies, and Ferraris, as well as at least a representative sample of the corpus of work by Da Vinci.
Similarly, to render a naked person, it needs to have had at least some source material representing what people look like under their clothes, or it's not going to know what genitalia look like.
I've not seen the supposed output of Grok (I've never even used Grok, since I won't touch Elmo's stuff on principle), so I don't know how realistic or convincing the output is, but the reporting would suggest that it is accurate enough to cause concerns, which implies that it has been fed accurate training data.
Once again, a statistical model cannot produce output that does not meet the patterns of its input. In simple terms, it can either provide an "average" of the data it is provided, interpolate between two data points, or extrapolate from a series. If it hasn't been trained on images of naked people, then this would be a case of extrapolation, and I simply do not believe that an unthinking piece of computer software would correctly extrapolate these images. The conclusion, then, is that it is either "averaging" from a large number of images of naked people, or interpolating between, say, the image of one person clothed, and another naked. You cannot interpolate between two points without knowing both points. This is, of course, a simplification, but the thing here is that "AI" cannot create anything new, and anyone who tells you it can is swindling you.
Sorry if I was unclear, I meant that I believe a diffusion model would be capable of making simulated, fake CSAM based on inputs of just nude adults and clothed children, though I'm really not interested in testing this hypothesis beyond pointing to pink elephants
This is a fair point, and whilst there is perfectly understand outrage about the CSAM aspect, this shouldn't lessen the outrage around using this sort of system to remove the clothing from images of adults.
Quite frankly, if this software is being used to do things that humans can do, such as synthesising images of people without their clothes, and without their consent, it should be subject to the same rules and regulations that a human would be.
It is a ridiculous situation where a person would (rightly) be hauled up in court for creating a fake nude of another person without their consent and publishing it, but a machine can churn out tens out thousands of such images in the same time and nobody faces any consequences for it.
Put simply, if the purpose, by design, of Grok isn't to produce non-consensual explicit pictures of real people, without their consent, why has it been trained on the data that allows it to do so?
The CSAM angel is a little different, because not only is it illegal to produce such images of real people, it is also illegal (in the UK at least) to produce such images of entirely fictional children. If safeguards cannot be put in place, that are absolutely reliable and cannot be circumvented, and there are good reasons to believe that this is actually impossible (analogous to the halting problem), then there is an argument that the entire technology is flawed, or at the very least, that its operators should be held responsible for its use in a much more structured manner.
Oddly enough, though, I can't see a world where Elon Musk is held personally responsible for every illegal image his software produces, even though his grubby hands are all over rigging its algorithms.
Put simply, if the purpose, by design, of Grok isn't to produce non-consensual explicit pictures of real people, without their consent, why has it been trained on the data that allows it to do so?
The consent bit is important. I don't think there's a strong case for criminalising, say adult performers, using diffusion models to touch up or even heavily fake their own images, or for professional editors to do so with the correct consent and licensing. 'Make my tits a bit bigger, my waist a bit thinner and clean up the bikini line' is just 101 in that world for a long time now.
The technology is going to exist one way or another, and I suppose X's argument will be that if it exists and has legitimate uses then why shouldn't they be able to produce a tool that caters to that market? Note that X is full of porn. It's not exactly a family-friendly social media site.
Their (or just Elon's) attitude on it stinks. They could put more effort into the guard-rails, even though they will probably never be bulletproof. But what they or anyone else can't do is put the genie back in the bottle.
People have been editing pictures for a long time. I similarly find it difficult to understand some of them, but there are plenty of reasons to edit something that do make sense. For example, if I wanted to take a picture of me doing something but someone was in the background, deleting that person would preserve their privacy as they likely didn't intend to appear in my picture. Or I could make a juxtaposition of a picture by showing the real thing and a faked alternative to make a point. I don't tend to do either of those, but those both make sense while touching up reality to make it look better makes less sense to me even though I know that a very large number of people do it.
It may be a huge difference in the ethics of doing it, though I already have a problem with the first set of removals, but we're talking about technical complexity. Removals can be done more than once if that's what it takes for the user to get the output they want, and unless the software has checks to try to stop them, and Grok appears not to have them or to have very broken ones, then it can still happen. So far, the allegations haven't suggested that Grok is doing this on less explicit prompts, just that when explicitly requested to do so, it does. Both would be problems.
But surely it occurred to them that filling in genitals might be taking the "image editing" capability a bit too far, and it could have rendered those parts like mannequins. There's no way this was unexpected when image editing was released, or that the programmers themselves hadn't been doing exactly that with plenty of photos while they were testing it.
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Dear AC. Just a heads-up that your post could be interpreted as a cynical attempt to promote the creation and dissemination of pornographic images of children.
Not that I'd interpret it that way myself.
Oh, no, definitely not.
It could be. But first one would have to get past the pretzel logic claiming that X is "the last truly open forum on the Internet." Which is so insanely laughable as to cause one to debate the poster's connection to reality.
I'm starting to think that about 90% of the AC posts here are the same person. There certainly do seem to be a lot of very deranged posts made behind the shroud of anonymity, which again, is especially cowardly given that a user's handle hardly reveals their true identity.
I'm going to suggest that if the undresee were a child, and the images/videos freely and publicly available, their parents might beg to differ with you (and that's just the most extreme end of the issue).
FFS, I cannot see even the remotes justification for the facility to create and disseminate such images to be readily available to all and sundry — "freedom of expression" does not even come close. Surely even the most zealous Musk fanboi would concede that freedom of expression is not unconstrained (unless you're a very literal anarchist). I cannot, for example, express my freedom to arbitrarily kill someone I don't like, because, y'know, it's against the law. If laws are currently inadequate to protect people against a novel form of obvious and clearcut abuse, and provide no redress against such abuse, then the law needs to catch up.
"We have implemented technological measures to prevent the Grok account from allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing..."
Notice the mention of 'real people' which suggests that anime, video game, or cartoon characters - even if depicting a child - are still fair game for undressing with Grok. Which FYI in the UK is still a criminal offense to create or distribute.
Just think if you were an early investor in SpaceX you are now thanks to Musk also an investor in this dumpster fire of a AI/Social media platform as well!
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Gee, you mean all civilized countries have laws against child sex abuse material and nudification apps to protect people instead of corporate profits while the US government has been "bought off" to let X, Elon, Trump, and all the other child abusers get off scott free.
After all, if the mountain of Epstein evidence isn't enough to lay charges and convict anyone, then clearly their legal systtem us very badly broken and does nothing to protect citizens at all when the bribes are rolling in...
