The perils of naughty piccies by Grok
We appear to be having one of those public fits of morality for which the British are famous.
First there’s the observation that AI can be used to create naughty images. Yes, this does in fact mean all the different services, including the open source ones that can be run on a home PC, can be used to create such imagery. This is then focused in a two minute hate upon the evil of the day, X/Twitter and Grok. At which point X limits the ability to do so to paid accounts - paid accounts being those where the individual operating the account is a known individual. Anonymous accounts are not available*. So, X has, pretty much, solved the problem.
Who is going to use a named and identified account to do something that’s illegal after all? At which point we’re told that this is “insulting”. Solving the problem is insulting, eh?
One step further forward:
Under the Online Safety Act, sharing intimate images without someone’s consent, or threatening to share them, including images of people in their underwear, is a criminal offence for individuals and for platforms.
My predecessor [Peter Kyle] rightly made this a priority offence, so services have to take proactive action to stop this content from appearing in the first place.
The Data Act, passed last year, made it a criminal offence to create or request the creation of nonconsensual and intimate images.
And today I can announce to the house that this offence will be brought into force this week, and that I will make it a priority offence in the Online Safety Act.
This means individuals are committing a criminal offence if they create or seek to create such content, including on X. And anyone who does this should expect to face the full extent of the law.
This is, we assume, Section 138. Where the criminality is in the request to produce such imagery. It’s the person asking Grok for a picture of the Prime Minister in a bikini** that is committing the offence, not the software performing the task.
So, how would one know who had made the request - which is the criminal act - for an offensive image if it’s from a tool open to all anonymously? Whereas if the tool can only be used by those individually identified it is then a great deal simpler to identify who is committing the criminal act of asking for offensive imagery to be created. Which brings us back to the limitation to paid accounts - this seems a precondition of being able to enforce this law. But having already announced the imposition of that precondition is, we are told, insulting.
Ah well, no one ever said that these fits of morality have to be logical now, did they?
Tim Worstall
*There are very complex ways of doing that but they themselves would not necessarily be legal or even likely.
**Not really, as a picture of the PM in a bikini might be offensive to either us or the PM but it’s not illegal. One would need to go further into depravity for it to be illegal.