Why sexually explicit images of children mean we're quitting X/Twitter and you should too
The misuse of AI tool Grok on Elon Musk’s X social media platform to create fake naked pictures of women and girls is the last straw
When it came down to it, the decision was easy and it should be for the UK Government too. X is a very different space from its predecessor, on which entertaining, and often enlightening, tweets from Stephen Fry, various other celebrities and politicians drew us into Twitter conversations.
Then it could make me laugh, cry or think about the important issues of the day. Not now.
These days it makes me despair at the level of debate, if you can call it that, or recoil in horror at reports of the abuse meted out to some by its contributors.
Recently new depths have been plumbed with the misuse of its Grok AI tool leading the UK Parliament’s Women and Equalities Select Committee, of which I am vice-chair, to become the first UK parliamentary body to stop using it.
READ MORE: Grok's appalling slur about SNP MP shows AI bots still cannot be trusted to tell us the truth
Undressed electronically and worse
As a member of that committee, I have heard horrifying stories of the distress that women – and even girls – have suffered through the publication of fake intimate images.
That a social media platform would create and make widely available an AI tool which makes it possible for us to be abused in that way, undressed electronically and worse, seems incomprehensible.
I am immensely proud of the committee and hope others, particularly the government itself, follow suit to fight the insidious growth of harmful material on the internet.
The night before the decision I had remarked on Sky TV that my criticism of intimate image abuse on X and other platforms would no doubt provoke a storm of personal insults. I was right.
READ MORE: SNP MP Pete Wishart taking legal advice after Elon Musk's AI tool Grok calls him 'rape enabler'
Beyond disgusting
I also took a sneaky look at responses to my final post before writing this and surprise, surprise it was all vacuous or vitriol. No value.
Most frustrating is that it never needed to be this way. Both social media and AI should, and can be, instruments for good. But AI’s misuse to abuse women, create naked versions of people, of children, in sexually explicit poses is beyond disgusting.
Listening to one woman’s account on TV of the distress at finding online images of herself manipulated to make her appear nude was gut-wrenching. How do you cope with the thought not only that someone would do that to you, but that your friends, relatives and colleagues have seen it and may think it’s genuine?
Then there are the young people we have all heard of, bullied into taking their own lives by social media abuse. Following the outcry about Grok this week, Musk said he was limiting its use to paid contributors. Big deal.
The current legislation is not enough, and perhaps he hopes acting first will protect him. But for me the changes simply mean he will make money out of the unacceptable.
Mulling things over, I spotted a Newsnight interview with AI ‘Godfather’ and Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton who has often expressed concerns about the way his invention is being developed.
He described Musk as "much less careful" with material around hate speech and child sexual abuse than other AI services, and said “it's a bit sad to see all the misuse" of a tool with so much potential for physics, environmental and medical research.
It’s time we listened. Time we protected people from abuse, AI from corruption and the future for all of us.
Christine Jardine is Scottish Liberal Democrat MP for Edinburgh West
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