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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

The constant comparisons with Photoshop are so disingenuous. We all know what the difference is.

If Adobe had a service where you could E-mail them "Please generate and post CSAM for me" and in response, their backend service did it and posted it, that's a totally different story then the user doing it themself in Photoshop. Come on. We all know about tech products here, and we can all make this distinction.

Grok's interface is not "draw this pixel here, draw this pixel there." It's "Draw this child without clothing." Or "Draw this child in a bikini." Totally different.

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And the service was designed by Grok, hosted by Grok, you interact with it through systems controlled by Grok, at a surface level Grok makes decisions and grok makes the output. And it is quite possible the Grok knew that illegal image creation was possible. 99.9% of the work to make those images is within grok.

Not to be too pedantic, but I think you mean Grok with a k. Groq with a q is a separate AI hardware company.

Thanks, changed that.

I see at least 2 axes here: * Should access to a tool be restricted of it is used for malice * Is a company complicit if its automated service is being used for malice

For 1, crowbars are generally available but knives and guns are heavily regulated in the vast majority of the world, even though both are used for murder as well as legitimate applications.

For 2, things get even more complicated. Eg if my router is hacked and participates in a botnet I am generally not liable, but if I rent out my house and the tenant turns it into a weed farm i am liable.

Liability is placed where it minimises perceived societal cost. Emphasis on perceived.

What is worse for society, limiting information access to millions of people or allowing csam, harrassment and shaming?

It is not clear that limiting Grok limits information access to millions of people, so I think your premise is flawed.

There are plenty of other resources that could serve the same people that Grok serves. Further, the fact that we aren't having discussions about ChatGPT or Claude as CSAM generators also suggests that Grok could be limited in ways that it isn't being limited currently.

how is it different? i don't get it.

If curl is used by hackers in illegal activity, culpability falls on the hackers, not the maintainers of curl.

If I ask the maintainers of curl to hack something and they do it, then they are culpable (and possibly me as well).

Using Photoshop to do something doesn’t make Adobe complicit because Adobe isn’t involved in what you’re using Photoshop for. I suppose they could involve themselves, if you’d prefer that.

so why is the culpability on grok?

Because Grok posts child porn, which is illegal. Section 230 doesn't apply, since the child porn is clearly posted by Grok.

where did grok post child porn?

X, formerly Twitter.

It's the frictionless aspect of it. It requires basically no user effort to do some serious harassment. I would say there's some spectrum of effort that impacts who is liable along with a cost/benefit analysis of some safe guards. If users were required to give paragraph long jailbreaks to achieve this and xAI had implemented ML filters, then I think there could be a more reasonable case that xAI wasn't being completely negligent here. Instead, it looks like almost no effort was put into restricting Grok from doing something ridiculous. The cost here is restricting AI image generation which isn't necessarily that much of a burden on society.

It is difficult to put similar safeguards into Photoshop and the difficulty of doing the same in Photoshop is much higher.

i think you have a point but consider this hypothetical situation.

you are in 1500's before the printing press was invented. surely the printing press can also reduce the friction to distribute unethical stuff like CP.

what is the appropriate thing to do here to ensure justice? penalise the authors? penalise the distributors? penalise the factory? penalise the technology itself?

Photocopiers are mandated by law to refuse copying currency. Would you say that's a restriction of your free speech or too burdensome on the technology itself?

You don’t understand the difference between typing “draw a giraffe in a tuxedo in the style of MC Escher” into a text box and getting an image in a few seconds, versus the skill and time necessary to do it in an image manipulation program?

You don’t understand how scale and accessibility matter? That having easy cheap access to something makes it so there is more of it?

You don’t understand that because any talentless hack can generate child and revenge porn on a whim, they will do it instead of having time to cool off and think about their actions?

yes but the onus is on the person calling grok and not grok.

So, is it that you don’t understand how the two differ (which is what you originally claimed), or that you disagree about who is responsible (which the person you replied to hasn’t specified)?

You made one specific question, but then responded with something unrelated to the three people (so far) who have replied.

why do you think that?

You could drive your car erratically and cause accidents, and it would be your fault. The fact that Honda or whoever made your car is irrelevant. Clearly you as the driver are solely responsible for your negligence in this case.

On the other hand, if you bought a car that had a “Mad Max” self driving mode that drives erratically and causes accidents, yes, you are still responsible as the driver for putting your car into “Mad Max” mode. But the manufacturer of the car is also responsible for negligence in creating this dangerous mode that need not exist.

There is a meaningful distinction between a tool that can be used for illegal purposes and a tool that is created specifically to enable or encourage illegal purposes.

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