Earlier this year, Elon Musk’s Grok AI engine on his X platform got into a lot of trouble because it allowed users to nonconsensually alter images of individuals, including minors, to show them in bikinis or transparent clothing or in sexually suggestive contexts. This was big news pretty much everywhere — except the Media Research Center, which has spent the past few years sucking up to Musk and which otherwise freaks out about the sexual exploitation of minors. Any reference to the scandal has been completely censored.
The closest the MRC got to it is a Feb. 24 post by Alex Christy, who was in comedy-cop mode by complaining that John Oliver pointed out how much darker X has gotten since Musk took over:
For some reason, HBO’s John Oliver decided that Elon Musk and his transformation of Twitter/X would make for golden comedic material for his main topic on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight. As Oliver tells it, the site has gotten “much darker” since Musk took over, but any reference to the prior problems or his native Britain’s creepy solutions was left unmentioned.
In fact, the unedited video shows that Oliver did reference the Grok scandal, but Christy made sure to edit it out and instead only vaguely refer to Oliver bringing up “problems with its AI Grok feature.” But it turns out Christy just wanted to bash Twitter’s previous management (and, cor course, Oliver):
First of all, Oliver did not mention that the previous leadership’s definition of “hate speech” and “disinformation” was notoriously broad. The Babylon Bee was banned from its account unless it deleted a joke that upset liberal transgender orthodoxy, and, most notably, users were forbidden from posting a New York Post link about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Second of all, the community notes feature has allowed for people to point out that people are trying to claim video game footage is something from real life.
Third, Oliver is not exactly a model of civil, reasonable, or well-informed discourse. He is a man who thinks the best thing about former President Ronald Reagan is that he is dead and who wishes his opponents would “rot in hell.”
Finally, anyone waiting for the Last Week Tonight episode that deals with Oliver’s native Britain arresting people for social media wrongthink would be well advised to not hold their breath.
Christy could have been honest and admitting the Grok nudification scandal is an issue that needed to be discussed. But it seems he’s under order never to criticize Musk for things it would criticize anyone else for doing.
Instead, Chirsty refused to explain why he chose to censor Musk’s Grok scandal.