Take big tech out of billionaire hands
Smith Samson, Waltham Forest Socialist Party
In a meeting with his tech employees, billionaire Elon Musk expressed his frustration with the ‘guardrails’ that had been placed on X’s – formerly Twitter – AI bot Grok. Despite workers’ reservations, the already limited safeguards were turned off in order to, in the eyes of Musk, unleash its full potential. The result was the replies of users being flooded with AI-generated pornographic images of themselves in states of undress and in compromising positions.
Unsurprisingly, the most affected users have been women, laying forth the rampant misogyny which exists unchecked on the platform. When users reported the posts, X’s content moderation team replied, saying no policies had been breached and it would not remove any of the nonconsensual pornographic content. Things came to a head when it was revealed that paedophiles had started using Grok to make images of underaged children.
X is under pressure to prevent the AI from creating content of this kind by the outrage people feel when seeing and hearing about this. X has now made it so only verified users – those that pay for the service – are able to use Grok to generate adult content. This means users can still generate pornographic pictures of real people, they just have to pay Elon Musk first!
What will Starmer do?
Keir Starmer’s response to the scandal was one of disgust combined with inaction. He said that X needed to “get a grip” and the government has now urged regulator Ofcom to look into X’s AI tool. Much hand-wringing has been made by right-wing online commentators who say Ofcom may ban X in the UK, but the regulator’s past inadequate responses to scandals embroiling social media companies suggest its reaction will be lacklustre. Trump has already threatened the EU with sanctions if it takes steps towards regulating US tech giants. Once again, Starmer is likely to submit to the forces of US capital and fail to protect women and children from having their images repurposed by AI into graphic content.
The only way real change can occur is through democratic public ownership of these big tech companies and control of their products, like AI and social media, by the working class. Big business will continue to propagate the worst the internet has to offer because they profit off of it, and the vast majority of us have no say how new technology is used. Tech workers getting organised in their trade unions could play a powerful role. Workers can stand up to the bosses and say they will not work on any technology, which creates so much harm when they know collective strength is backing their actions.
