Teens sue xAI over Grok's pornographic images of them | Hacker News Reader

Teens sue xAI over Grok's pornographic images of them

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I bet shareholders of SpaceX are thrilled to be exposed to this for no reason

You would lose this bet.

SpaceX owners do not care. If they were risk-averse, they would have dumped SpaceX like it was toxic waste.

In a broader sense, this "I bet Oracle shareholders hate their bad PR" attitude is really zero-sum. It's pervasive on HN, and we rarely ever see bad PR snowball beyond niche discussions. I want $BIGCORP to collapse as much as the next guy, but the outrage-derived comments don't seem to reflect the market's response.

I mean, there's "this is a risky investment in rockets and stuff" and then there is "this is a risky investment in rockets and stuff which has for some reason been coupled to a CSAM generator". One is going to be more off-putting to investors than the other.

I'll actually steelman against this. For the majority of SpaceX holders, they really do not care. They did not sell their stock when SpaceX started taking NRO contracts. They didn't grow a conscience when Starlink usage was limited in occupied Ukrainian territory. They aren't protesting rocket launches that put Israeli satellites into orbit, aiding and abetting a likely genocide of civilian populations. You think fake child abuse imagery will finally burst the dam? After all of this?

Like I said; some companies revel in their bad PR. Meta, Oracle, Microsoft, all of their misdeeds are untouchable. SpaceX isn't going anywhere, and everyone holding their shares knows it.

I mean, even for the completely amoral investor, they would still have to think about whether the magic abomination generator will _make money_. I would imagine that the Venn diagram of people who think that SpaceX will make loadsa money and those who think that whatever-the-hell Twitter is now will make loadsa money is not a circle.

Making money off of the proverbial Torment Nexus is SpaceX' specialty. They do it pretty well; the US fed loves their rockets, and feeds them contracts with margins that could finance a dozen suburbs. If X can pull off a similar pivot to being a federal lapdog, it would cost SpaceX investors nothing and expand the scope of their service contracts.

FWIW, I agree that "fake CSAM isn't real risk exposure" is a pretty crazy line to steelman. But we live in crazy times. SpaceX is an antifragile asset, and anything that enhances it's risk is seen as a value-add. This is exactly what America deserves for refusing to regulate our monopolies while they play the futures trade like Candy Land.

This is a legit tech topic. I disagree with the flagging. Legal and responsible technology use is a material area of discussion.

But poor, helpless little Elon must be protected from mean comments at all costs.

I don't understand why it was flagged unless it's just someone flagging anything negative about Musk related projects (which I don't think it is at all a valid reason).

That's exactly it. Everything negative about Musk gets flagged and downvoted, and the moderation doesn't care about that.

Honestly it's not even that moderation doesn't care. Garry Tan and PG were big DOGE fans, and I'm not silly enough to believe that the moderation are unaware of that fact.

There's been far too many flagged Musk stories that never get unflagged to put it down to simple incompetence and neglect.

I mean, honestly, "HN voting is poorly designed and is vulnerable to coordinated action" would explain it fairly neatly; I'd totally buy that this is incompetence vs malice by the operators.

With respect, if you believe that then you likely aren't aware of the true scale of the problem. Unless they follow /active, /new, and have [showdead] on, people have very little idea just how much is getting suppressed here... And it's a lot, especially this past year, and extremely especially if it's anything Musk-related.

Another reason most people here don't know how bad it's got is because posts about the poor flagging system are explicitly disallowed. For that reason alone it's quite hard to say this is purely incompetence with no malice.

You can ask mods for permission to make a post about the flagging system - you'll be denied. People have tried making posts about all the Musk stories being flagged - flagged by moderation. Every time. Quickly.

So, no. Unfortunately, this isn't a case where I'm happy to assume incompetence. Look at where we're at - a post about the richest tech bro in the world enabling mass creep shit of the worst kind remains flagged for hours. That's absolutely vile - and far from a rare event here.

Yeah, nah, it's that. Always happens.

Does it get flagged because of users or dang/admin? I don't see any other reason for this to get flagged.

Elon's simps tend to flag everything which is unfavourable to dear leader; this being flagged is nothing in particular to do with the actual topic.

As there exist laws to protect against someone abusing someone's name/reputation (i.e. libel and slander), there should also be laws to protect against abusing someone's image. It does not seem reasonable for people/companies to be allowed to manipulate an image of someone to misrepresent a situation.

I'm kind of curious what precedent this will set. It's pretty easy to create deepfake sexual content already and has been for years now. The grok thing is absurdly easy though on some level. To actually get full blown sexual content though I think is substantially more difficult and probably falls into the realm of hacking almost, that being said, it is of course possible. But it makes me wonder where the line lives for something like this. The people who did this are obviously scum of course and deserve to be punished, but by that argument facebook/instagram/whatsapp/whatever group-chats of leaked sex tapes have probably done far more damage.

In the past, you could be fined and jailed for violating a community's standard for obscene material. With global companies, their multinational status doesn't stop a small country from issuing arrest warrants. Whether they will be carried out is another matter.

Missing from such articles is a key information: who paid for the lawyers? I doubt teenage income would pay for a retainer.

As so often, following the money will reveal who actually has an interest here.

> As so often, following the money will reveal who actually has an interest here.

Do you mean to imply that the teens are a tool used by some secret cabal to attack Musk? Most likely their parents are paying for the lawyers in an attempt to get some justice from a billionaire that enabled a fucked up case of CSAM.

More than just enabling a fucked up case of CSAM, it's more like an energy intensive, environment destroying factory that produces CSAM.

Once again, I'm asking when we can start the Butlerian Jihad?

Incidentally, is the USA now becoming a safe haven for pedophiles? It just seems odd how other countries are investigating high profile people with ties to Epstein, but the USA celebrates them and even votes the biggest offender into the highest office.

I think it is in almost everyone's interest to ensure that people cannot be abused in such a fashion. Maybe people who wish to destroy society would condone this kind of abuse.

It's also possible for lawyers to take on cases on the understanding that they only get paid if they win.

Occam’s razor would suggest that it’s the same group of active natalists who subsidise the teenagers’ housing, education and healthcare – none of which are any cheaper than lawyers.

In the US, lawyers may generally work on a contingency basis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contingent_fee), and many lawyers and law firms also do pro bono work. That is, almost certainly no-one has paid for the lawyers, though if they manage to recover anything the lawyers may be due a cut.

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