#grok

#grok

deeply concerning

The social media platform said on Wednesday it had implemented technical measures to stop the @Grok account on X from allowing the editing of images of real people so that they appear to be in revealing clothing such as bikinis. Before this, users had been able to ask the @Grok account on X to manipulate images, with the result being published on the platform. X said this restriction would apply to all users, including paid subscribers to X.

Speaking from the SpaceX headquarters in South Texas on Monday, Secretary of Defense, sorry, War (and gargantuan stain on our patriotic conscience) Pete Hegseth announced Grok will join Google's Gemini to be a part of the Pentagon's new internal AI platform (GenAI.mil) later this month. "Very soon we will have the world's leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department," he said. (Here's a fine example of this "leading model" in action.) "AI is only as good as the data that it receives, and we're going to make sure that it's there."

Several governments and regulators have taken action over Grok's image tool, which is embedded in the X social media site and has provoked outrage as it allows users to manipulate images of women and children to remove their clothing and put them in sexual positions. The Musk-led company that developed Grok, xAI, said last week the ability to generate and edit images would be limited to paying subscribers on X.

On Friday morning, the Grok account on X started responding to some users' requests with a message saying that image generation and editing are "currently limited to paying subscribers." The message also includes a link pushing people towards the social media platform's $395 annual subscription tier. In one test of the system requesting Grok create an image of a tree, the system returned the same message.

The Minister for Media, Patrick O'Donovan, has deactivated his X account, saying he is "uncomfortable" with the platform and its AI tool Grok, which has been criticised for allowing the creation of sexually-explicit images without consent. The Fine Gael TD confirmed the move after attending the Stripe Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition in Dublin yesterday, where he was questioned by media about the controversy surrounding Grok and the wider misuse of artificial intelligence.

Ministers may quit platform as Grok 'undresses' women and children

One photorealistic Grok video, hosted on Grok.com, shows a fully naked AI-generated man and woman, covered in blood across the body and face, having sex, while two other naked women dance in the background. The video is framed by a series of images of anime-style characters. Another photorealistic video includes an AI-generated naked woman with a knife inserted into her genitalia, with blood appearing on her legs and the bed.

Twitter, also called X, the social media network owned and constantly used by the world's richest man as well as virtually every powerful person in the American tech industry, and on which the vast preponderance of national political figures also maintain active accounts, has a sexual harassment and child sexual abuse material (CSAM) problem. This has been true more or less since Elon Musk took it over, but this problem's latest and most repellent efflorescence is the result of one of Musk's signature additions as owner.

The research evaluated chatbots on hallucination rate, customer ratings, response consistency, and downtime rate. The chatbots were then assigned a reliability risk score from 0 to 99, with higher scores indicating bigger problems. Grok achieved an 8% hallucination rate, 4.5 customer rating, 3.5 consistency, and 0.07% downtime, resulting in an overall risk score of just 6. DeepSeek followed closely with 14% hallucinations and zero downtime for a stellar risk score of 4. ChatGPT's high hallucination and downtime rates gave it the top risk score of 99, followed by Claude and Meta AI, which earned reliability risk scores of 75 and 70, respectively.

Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump.

Grok's track record is spotty at best. But even by the very low standards of xAI, its failure in the aftermath of the tragic mass shooting at Bondi Beach in Australia is shocking. The AI chatbot has repeatedly misidentified 43-year-old Ahmed al Ahmed, the man who heroically disarmed one of the shooters, and claimed the verified video of his deed was something else entirely - including that it was an old viral video of a man climbing a tree.

While a deal to make Grok available across the federal government is now in place, the agency facilitating the partnership with Elon Musk's controversial chatbot has yet to incorporate it into its own flagship AI platform due to ongoing internal safety testing.Both lawmakers and advocacy groups have criticized the Trump administration's interest in Grok, over concerns about Musk's deepening relationship with the US government and the chatbot's antisemitic and otherwise offensive rants, from back in July.

X is testing a change to the way it handles links on iOS so that the buttons to like, reply, and repost will always be visible. Normally, when you click a link on X the page opens up and completely covers the original post. Apparently, this leads to fewer people clicking like or otherwise engaging with the content. A good chunk of people probably just don't return to Twitter at all after following an external link.