Grok and the A.I. Porn Problem

Elon Musk's X is living up to its name. Shortly after Elon Musk purchased Twitter, in 2022, he claimed that "removing child exploitation is priority #1." It was certainly a noble goal--social-media sites had become havens for distributing abusive materials, including child pornography and revenge porn, and there was perhaps no major platform as openly hospitable to such content as Twitter. Unlike Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, which restricted nudity and pornographic videos, Twitter allowed users to post violent and "consensually produced adult content" to their feeds without consequence. Long before Musk's takeover, Twitter had positioned itself as anti-censorship, the "free-speech wing of the free-speech party," as Tony Wang, the general manager of Twitter in the U.K., once put it--less concerned with policing content than with providing a public square for users to express themselves freely.