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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

They specifically created a "spicy" mode, I'm quite sure they know what they're doing. I'm sure we'll get a shocked pikachu face statement soon saying they couldn't possibly have predicted this would happen and they'll make double triple sure it never happens again.

It is... interesting to see xAI's moves lately. Other AI companies seem very determined to show themselves with a publicly acceptable face, xAI seem to be tacking for the gap in the market around adult content. If you browsed Reddit's /r/grok a couple of months ago it looked a lot like /r/openai. Now it's full of people talking about the "Ani" AI companion and the various adult things you can get her to do.

I'm sure they'll make an absolute ton of money from the male loneliness epidemic. All the while Musk decries falling birth rates.

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> At that point, all Weatherbed did was select "spicy" and confirm her birth date for Grok to generate a clip of Swift tearing "off her clothes" and "dancing in a thong" in front of "a largely indifferent AI-generated crowd."

I am honestly baffled at what she suspected would, or should, be the output. Like, seriously, what?

The Puritans are here to save us from our immorality.

You mean the immorality of sexually exploiting other people without their consent?

the immoral part makes it even sexier

And people wonder why there is a “male loneliness epidemic”.

americans are particularly moral - its their puritan past

Hey being stuck up is great. It creates sublimation , means ton of work, overcompensation (aka porn) and its great for institutions building, suppressed perverts make great servants of bureaucracy. The smithers effect is very real.

Okay, this question probably should be asked from a throwaway, but I'll bite: do you consider imagining some person, without the consent of that person, engaging in a sexual act, to be immoral? Putting this imagination of yours onto a paper, in the form of words or drawing?

Or is the problem here is the fact that such imagining was "commissioned" to a third party (I believe I have seen this opinion somewhere long time ago)?

> do you consider imagining some person, without the consent of that person, engaging in a sexual act, to be immoral?

Of course not. But that's a universe apart from producing and distributing sexual images of unconsenting others.

Is it though, if your neural link uploads your subconscious into the cloud for safety ?

Yes, third party automated "imagining" is the problem:

https://www.citizen.org/news/two-thirds-of-states-enact-bill...

I dunno, there’s a pretty big wealth of possibility between “entirely chaste” and “literally rips off her clothes”

I don’t think it’s reasonable at all for “spicy” to instantly take someone to fake pornography of a specific person.

When I saw the “spicy” option I thought it was about being sassy or playfully mean instead of the sanitized LLM voice.

Not straight to porn.

>> dancing in a thong

> porn

uhhh

Breasts exposed while dancing in nothing but a thong "" not porn ""

What is it then?

"just someone dancing" I bet they say, thinking "porn" is only hardcore penetration while ignoring/forgetting Girls Gone Wild's entire conceit.

The norm is moving. People likely seen more naked then many of there ancestors would have combined. Let alone Solidcenter smut.

Well, "porn" has a very loose definition and varies country by country. IMO it's either nudity (but remember free the nipple movement when you try to define nudity) and/or sexual act usually involving penetration.

Anyway, anyone dancing in a thong isn't even soft-core pornography in my book. Still morally wrong tho in this context.

Victorian ankle showing -> porn

Female moderator showing the weather to be wet soon -> porn

screen unplugged (censored but still) -> porn

Open a .xxx site.. Straight to porn. Click on any word related to flavors... Straight to porn. Clear your browser cache... Believe it or not, straight to porn.

On the other hand, Swift is a public figure, and with that comes parody -- I'd be more sympathetic if it was a private individual, but existing harassment and defamation laws could handle that most likely. Fake (insert celebrity) Photoshops have been with us since the 90s.

>When I saw the “spicy” option I thought it was about being sassy or playfully mean instead of the sanitized LLM voice.

Yeah, I thought it would just not have NSFW restrictions, I find the idea someone's like "What's the value of twenty dollars from 1920 adjusted for inflation" and suddenly you're got the guy from the Gangam Style video screaming into a butt but it's the Pope's face or something.

Creating fake nudes of people is not "parody". Parody says something, that's what gives it the artistic value we weigh above the targets desire to control their image. Fake nudes don't carry any message worth protecting.

>Creating fake nudes of people is not "parody". Parody says something, that's what gives it the artistic value we weigh above the targets desire to control their image. Fake nudes don't carry any message worth protecting.

And how are we to define what is parody -- ask the person parodied?

Nobody but Trump seems to be saying what South Park did is anything but protected speech for example.

Unfortunately, sometimes objectionable things are done with free speech -- we need to balance the harms to the many against the complaints of the few, and further... under my arguement you can simply not be a public figure if you don't want these sorts of things to happen.

It's well established that public figures have less rights around these matters.

> And how are we to define what is parody -- ask the person parodied?

I gave you a definition. You could start with that and highlight anything you disagree with.

If you're instead talking about legal definitions then nobody cares. There's no overt protection of parody anywhere I can find in American law, at least if we not talking about Copyright, which we aren't. If you made a free speech defense of something like this, I'd probably say it falls into the "Obscenity" category of exemptions, but that's not for me to argue.

> It's well established that public figures have less rights around these matters.

That's generally not how it's framed. Generally we'd say that public figures have the same rights, but that the public has more of an _interest_ (defined not by desire but by need to confront power) in discussing/parodying/ridiculing them.

I suppose if you're the powerful person, you might frame that as "having less rights", but the rights of the powerful have never been what needed protection.

>I gave you a definition. You could start with that and highlight anything you disagree with.

You did not define parody, you simply stated that "Creating fake nudes of people is not 'parody'. Parody says something, that's what gives it the artistic value we weigh above the targets desire to control their image.", which did not address my initial point -- sometimes an artwork is merely saying "fuck you", or even nothing at all -- you fail to lay out how to operationalize your subjective views on what is or is not "art"

>If you're instead talking about legal definitions then nobody cares.... There's no overt protection of parody anywhere I can find in American law

Factually inaccurate -- there's literally an entire subsection about parody in the article on fair use in Wikipedia -- deepfakes are often created from copyrighted images.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Parody

> You did not define parody [...]

That is a definition, it's a very broad, very vague definition, but is it a definition. I'm not going to engage with your spurious nonsense about "art". If you cant separate "art" and "parody" for even two sentences, it's not worth discussing definitions with you.

> Factually inaccurate -- there's literally an entire subsection about parody in the article on fair use in Wikipedia

Fair use is a doctrine of copyright, which I stated explicitly i was ignoring.

I will not be responding further.

Must be nice, declaring any argument contrary to one's position "spurious nonsense" and darting off into the night. (A parody is a form of art.)

If you want to make some kind of point about Taylor Swift that involves her being nude then you can do it with a cartoon or something. There's no artistic or parodic merit in creating a plausible-looking fake nude.

> When I saw the “spicy” option I thought it was about being sassy or playfully mean instead of the sanitized LLM voice.

It is age restricted, do you really expect a spicy option that is blocked for children is anything but nudes?

There’s plenty of age restricted content out there that isn’t sexual. “Adult” is a term with many meanings.

99.9% of which, in the context of the internet, is porn.

Probably the same as when she did the same test with children or explicitly asked for "nonconsensual nude" - the system refused to generate pornographic images because of safeguards.

  Weatherbed noted that asking Grok directly to generate non-consensual nude Swift images did not generate offensive outputs, but instead blank boxes. Grok also seemingly won't accept prompts to alter Swift's appearance in other ways, like making her appear to be overweight. And when Weatherbed tested using "spicy" mode on images of children, for example, Grok refused to depict kids inappropriately.

i cant imagine "testing" to see if it would generate csam. speedrunning psychological damage and not really the person who should be in charge of validating that.

this is a misleading quote. the prompt was "Taylor Swift celebrating Coachella with the boys.". that prompt plus "spicy" is still asking for trouble, but your quote makes it sound like they asked for 'Swift tearing "off her clothes" and "dancing in a thong"'

I believe creating "spicy" content without the persons consent and charging money for it is more the issue here.

I for one suspected the AI-generated crowd to be excited.

I find it interesting that AI companies take the generated porn of celebrities seriously but they don’t do a good job with safe guards for mental health, for example

One has actual legal consequences. Mental health is a far more nebulous thing.

Deep fake nudes are illegal so…I guess I would expect the output to be something else?

>> I'm sure they'll make an absolute ton of money from the male loneliness epidemic. All the while Musk decries falling birth rates.

That just occurred to me the other day. Our unfettered business focused economy is self destructing at a meta level. We're at the point where peoples attention and even emotion are for sale. We've all heard about dopamine hits as rewards for using apps or keeping people in a game. The problem is hoarding these aspects of life for company profits is taking them away from people who need those to reproduce. You need time, emotion, attention, and yes the physiological response to sex in order to reproduce. Meanwhile the cost of raising children is going up when it probably should be going down (for profit healthcare, for profit education, etc..) so even from a rational PoV it makes less sense to have kids.

There are certainly other things at play, but business as usual is destroying the population - it's own customer base.

> I'm sure they'll make an absolute ton of money from the male loneliness epidemic.

They and others, there's probably dozens of projects popping up to create multimodal companion AIs. character.ai specializes in fictional or custom characters, Discord has some bots that allow for giving them a personality of sorts, Facebook is pushing hard for it, even making the AI bots message you instead of only replying, etc.

It's happening already, and if xAI doesn't join in they may lose a possible market opportunity, depending on whether 'companion' AI sticks.

>make an absolute ton of money from the male loneliness epidemic. All the while Musk decries falling birth rates

There's something about profiting from both the problem and it's solution here. Like Sam A. profits from ChatGPT being used to create human-like bots on the internet while also involved in that eyeball-scanning-blockchain company that's selling a human verification solution to the same problems caused by openai.

I guess also similar to starve the beast strategy: cause a problem and exploit it for narrative gain.

the blockchain company came before ai though

Both GPT-2 was released, and Worldcoin was founded, in 2019. I'm not going to call him a super genius, anyone cynnical enough and working at openai could see where things were going back then and they haven't been proven wrong.

> Anyone cynnical enough and working at openai could see where things were going back then and they haven't been proven wrong. what do you mean

Reminds me of the contrast people noted between search engines[1]. xAI is gonna get good at serving its market. And if it's market is "spicy" it's gonna get good at that. The other AI companies are gonna get good at their own niches too.

[1]https://img.ifunny.co/images/237a897c7058903fa2f5bb5fd0f9949...

you assume he cares about falling birthrates.

> I'm sure they'll make an absolute ton of money from the male loneliness epidemic. All the while Musk decries falling birth rates.

I don't think they expect to make money from this crowd. If they were socially literate and well-functioning enough to have money, they'd be doing something else with their lives. This is a bet on the culture war. Musk derives a lot of his aesthetic value and political power from the "anti-woke" culture war, and he wants that to continue.

I mean, there is also the little part of the story where a woman, irrespective of how famous she might be, is having adult content rendered with her likeness without her consent.

I personally don't give two fucks if Grok can make porn. Neat, I might actually use it then. That doesn't make deepfakes less troubling.

That's the real issue in my opinion. Not the "sexy pics", but the "without consent" thing.

There's a pretty obvious solution that as technology minded people it is easy to accept and a society we will have no choice but to shift into - no image it's real they are all deepfakes even the real ones.

Even if everybody understands that an AI image is not real it can still cause a ton of harm to people. High schoolers distributing a bunch of fake nudes of their classmates is still abuse, even if everybody knows that they aren't real nudes.

Society used to feel the same way about posting any picture of another person online without permission. I would prefer to return to that philosophy.

Just more vice signaling from this awful company. Like with the white genocide or mechahitler "controversies", they're doing it to pander to the mentally ill edgelord demographic who thinks saying "heil hitler" is the coolest shit. And it's working, they're all worshipping Musk like he isn't the pathetic excuse of a human being he is.

Spicy mode wont generate nude men.

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