Paris Marx on the aforelinked Grok shitshow:

Let’s be honest with ourselves: if a broadcaster or newspaper had started publishing thousands of non-consensual, sexually explicit images of women or — even worse — of children, politicians and regulators would be out for blood. It would be a front-page, ongoing scandal and the organization responsible would be quickly brought to heel because it would be so outrageous.

But when Elon Musk and his chatbot Grok do it, there’s somehow little more than crickets. Politicians are alarmed and say something needs to be done, but can’t quite say what that something is. Regulators say they’re investigating, as thousands more women and children are victimized while the richest man in the world continues treating the whole situation like a big game — or simulation.

Governments must ban X, argues Marx:

Regulators and politicians in some countries have been responding to what’s happening on X. The European Union, United Kingdom, France, and Australia are all investigating the matter, with some even saying what X is enabling is illegal. Indian officials gave X a 72-hour deadline to act on the illegal material, while some Brazilian politicians are calling for the platform to be banned once again. But let’s be real: the responses of regulators to a child porn-producing chatbot on the social media platform owned by the richest man in the world are not nearly strong or quick enough.

Creating a chatbot that victimizes thousands of women on command and generates child pornography should be a red line — and not one you can come back from. Elon Musk and anyone at X or xAI directly working on that functionality should be criminally held to account for the consequences of their actions. But many countries will not have jurisdiction for those crimes. Instead, they should take the obvious move of banning X before the harm it causes their citizens escalates even further.

One place Musk won’t have to worry about a ban is the United States—not while his pedophilia-adjacent buddy is in charge.