Elon’s “Nudify” Mess: How X Supercharged Deepfakes

On Christmas Eve, Elon Musk’s X rolled out an in-app tool that lets users alter other people’s photos and post the results directly in reply. With minimal safeguards, it quickly became a pipeline for sexualized, non-consensual deepfakes, including imagery involving minors, delivered straight into victims’ notifications. Renée DiResta, Hany Farid, and Casey Newton join Kara to dig into the scale of the harm, the failure of app stores and regulators to act quickly, and why the “free speech” rhetoric used to defend the abuse is incoherent. Kara explores what accountability could look like — and what comes next as AI tools get more powerful. Renée DiResta is the former technical research manager at Stanford's Internet Observatory. She researched online CSAM for years and is one of the world’s leading experts on online disinformation and propaganda. She’s also the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality. Hany Farid is a professor of computer sciences and engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He’s been described as the father of digital image forensics and has spent years developing tools to combat CSAM. Casey Newton is the founder of the tech newsletter Platformer and the co-host of The New York Times podcast Hard Fork. This episode was recorded on Tuesday, January 20th. When reached for comment, a spokesperson for X referred us to a ⁠a statement post on X⁠, which reads in part: We remain committed to making X a safe platform for everyone and continue to have zero tolerance for any forms of child sexual exploitation, non-consensual nudity, and unwanted sexual content. We take action to remove high-priority violative content, including Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) and non-consensual nudity, taking appropriate action against accounts that violate our X Rules. We also report accounts seeking Child Sexual Exploitation materials to law enforcement authorities as necessary. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:12Kara Swisher?

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. On Christmas Eve, Elon Musk announced a new AI feature called Grok Image Edit. It's an image-editing tool built into X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter. The tool allows users to create AI-edited versions of other users' images and then post the AI version as a reply to the original post on X. But because X rolled out Grok Image Edit with almost no safeguards, strangers flooded X with sexualized deepfakes of real people. For example, Grok could take a photo of a woman on X and create a realistic deepfake that looks like the original image, except the woman is now in a bikini and has "donut

• 0:56Kara Swisher?

  glaze" on her face. It could do the same thing with images of children, and it did, creating countless deepfakes. To add insult to injury, because those images were often posted as replies to the original tweet, the people who were victimized got notifications every time someone interacted or replied to the sexualized deepfake image. So in essence, Elon built a tool for creating and distributing sexualized deepfakes, and he did so in the most humiliating and degrading way possible for the victims. And X has arguably become the tool for creating and distributing AI-generated child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, what used to be known as child porn, and frankly, still is.

• 1:40Kara Swisher?

  No surprise, governments across the globe have begun investigations into Grok, and after publicly mocking the controversy and accusing his critics of censorship, XAI has started putting guardrails on Grok with mixed success. It's deeply ironic, considering that when Elon bought Twitter, he vowed that getting CSAM off the site was the "priority number one" and "will forever be our top priority." But it's not surprising, given that Elon has positioned Grok as the "spicy and anti-woke chatbot," and it's not the first time Grok has made news for generating non-consensual deepfakes. Also, Elon, as he's proven time and again, always takes the heinous position on any

• 2:22Kara Swisher?

  subject, and this—I can't believe I'm saying this—is his most heinous. The backlash against Grok has been swift and widespread, thankfully. But so far, the consequences have been minimal. I think it's important to talk about this because I remember when everyone agreed that child porn was wrong. The fact that we're debating it right now is sickening. As a parent, as a reporter, as a citizen of this world, it's grotesque what these people are doing and benefiting from it financially and otherwise. My guests today are Renee Duresta, Hany Farid, and Casey Newton. Renee Duresta is the former Technical Research Manager at Stanford's Internet Observatory.

• 3:05Kara Swisher?

  She studied CSAM for years and is one of the world's leading experts on online disinformation and propaganda. She's also the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality. Hani Farid is a professor of computer sciences and engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. He's been described as the father of digital image forensics and has spent years developing tools to combat CSAM. Casey Newton is the founder of the tech newsletter platformer and the co-host of the New York Times podcast, Hard Fork. This is a difficult but important topic. It means a lot to me, so please stick around. And to all the tech people who continue to resist doing anything about safety, especially

• 3:47Kara Swisher?

  of children, we are not going to stop until you lay down and change the situation.

• 3:58Kara Swisher?

  Support for this show comes from The Guardian and their new show, Stateside, where journalists Kai Wright and Carter Sherman use the entire independent reporting resources of The Guardian to slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what is actually happening in the world. Join Kai and Carter three times a week as they utilize all the reporting resources The Guardian has across news, international coverage, climate, culture, wellness, and more. And The Guardian's not owned by a billionaire. They fearlessly report the facts without interference. Go to theguardian.com/stateside to learn more and listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube. That's theguardian.com/stateside.

• 4:42Kara Swisher?

  Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow, none of them ever talk to each other. That's where Odoo comes in. An all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try it today for free at Odoo.com/ Kara. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash Kara.

• 5:25Speaker 01

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• 6:12Kara Swisher?

  Renee, Hani, and Casey, thanks for coming on.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Hey Kara.

• 6:16Kara Swisher?

  Hey Kara. This is a topic I really wanted to do a show about. I'm sort of incandescent as a parent and as a person who's watched this go on. And so I have feels about it, so just get ready. But thanks for being here.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  It's good to be with you.

• 6:30Kara Swisher?

  Grok has been in the news for weeks because it's facilitating the creation and distribution of deeply disturbing sexualized images. Some of them are non-consensual deepfakes and potentially even CSAM. But CSAM, deepfakes, and revenge porn are serious problems that they've plagued the internet for years. This is not a new thing. So before we dive into the issues with Grok, let's talk about the scope and scale of the problem. Let's hear first from Renee, then Casey, then Hany.

• 6:54Speaker 03

  Okay, so as you note, this has been an issue for a very, very long time. Grok is not the first model to be capable of doing this. One of the things that I think we should talk about, first, it began to happen on Grok late December, so maybe we're almost a month, a month into this issue. It began producing what you might call nudefied images. So nudefication, the ability to do what's called inpainting, to change an image that already exists, is a technology that, again, has been around for a while. It's got a lot of other legitimate uses. It became something that on Grok, you could see it done very visually in the public eye. So this was something that had previously been done much more in platforms and communities

• 7:39Speaker 03

  that were dedicated to this kind of thing, right? So there were always, you know, communities that you could go and find Discord servers, places where users would do this. Then there was a spate of apps that began to pop up that the app stores were playing whack-a-mole with, where kids started doing this to harass their classmates. So there was this, these sort of small-scale little apps that were, where this was happening. But Grok really made it something that was very front and center. People were being harassed in their own replies. And it began to be something that took that harassment out of the dark corners of the web, which was the threat model that a lot of people who have studied this for a very long time, that was, that was how, how we had previously seen it manifest.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  And it took it and became something where it was happening at around almost 6,700 posts per hour, was the stat that some of the researchers who tracked it took it to.

• 8:31Kara Swisher?

  So they, they essentially just amplified it.

• 8:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, it became the place where you could create, distribute, and honestly normalize. It became something that all of a sudden was normalized. You could just go and you could do it. And that was what was different about it.

• 8:43Kara Swisher?

  Okay, Casey?

• 8:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, you know, as Renee notes, nudefication has been a problem going back many years. In the recent past, though, you couldn't get one of the frontier models to generate a photorealistic image of a naked person. You would kind of have to hack your way around it and deal with a subpar image. But nonetheless, there were tons of unscrupulous app makers who were buying ads on Meta and who were buying ads on Apple and Google's Play Stores, getting these apps into the hands of thousands of people who were using them to terrorize especially young Women, and it was a bad problem. And it did lead to things like the Take It Down Act, which did pass here in the United States. But as Renee notes, what has happened on Grok

• 9:29Speaker 04

  has just taken it to an insane new degree where you don't have to go scrounge around on the dark web to find one of these apps or use a subpar model. You can now use one of those powerful models that we have and harass people directly in their own replies in public.

• 9:45Kara Swisher?

  Right, in public. And so this is this spicy mode, honey? Is that what it, explain that.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  So first, I think Renee got it exactly right. What Grok did is they centralized the creation, the distribution and the normalization of this content, which now dates 10 years back. In fact, the very term deep fake comes from the moniker of a Reddit user who used the then nascent technology to create the first non-consensual intimate imagery. So this is neither unintended or unexpected. And then it was also preventable. So your point, Kara, about the spicy mode is OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini have pretty good guardrails. And they have guardrails on the semantic inputs, what you type in. They won't allow certain types of prompts. They have semantic guardrails on the output. They will analyze the output image to determine if it shows a child, if it's sexually explicit.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  And Grok decided we don't want to do that, hence the spicy mode. So this is neither, you know, sometimes we have technology where people misuse it in a way that is unintended or unexpected. This is neither. This was, we knew exactly what was going to happen. Elon Musk knew what he was doing, and he allowed it to happen. And it's been awful. And Renee also made a really good point here is that this stuff has been around for a long time. But it was sort of.

• 10:57Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, talk about that, the larger, broader.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's talk about that. So we're seeing this up and down the stack. I mean, there's hardly a day goes by where I don't see an article about some school kids creating this type of images of their fellow classmates and then, of course, sharing it and distributing it. People are using it to weaponize against reporters, against academics, against politicians, against people they just don't like. And it is, you know, there's multiple facts parts to this. So there's obviously the people who are creating the content. There is the tech they're using. There is the platform that. Empowers them, but then we shouldn't also forget there's an entire ecosystem that's enabling this advertisers still advertising on X, Apple and Google are still hosting these

• 11:40Speaker 02

  apps, ads are being delivered by Google and Facebook, there's an entire ecosystem that is monetizing and profiting from this, not just the technology companies that create the content and we shouldn't forget that entire Silicon Valley ecosystem is profiting in quite handsomely from the creation and distribution of this content.

• 11:58Kara Swisher?

  Including of CSAM.

• 12:00Speaker 02

  Including CSAM, which is, you know, look, maybe reasonable people want to have a conversation about non-consensual intimate imagery. I don't think there's much of a conversation, but there's no conversation around CSAM, right?

• 12:10Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  It's illegal and it's awful and it's dangerous. So this is not, you know, we're not talking about constitutional rights.

• 12:17Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 12:17Speaker 02

  We're talking about illegal content.

• 12:18Kara Swisher?

  We've agreed on a long time ago. And Casey, a lot has happened in just a few weeks, foreign governments have blocked Grok, other ones are investigating, so is California's Attorney General, the UK is working on passing a new law to make it legal to create non-consensual intimate images. But first Elon mocked the controversy, then XAI made Grok's added a premium feature, meaning you had to pay for it, I guess. Now XAI says they've instituted guardrails to stop it from nudefying images with limited success. Give us an update.

• 12:46Speaker 04

  There is an article in Bloomberg by Kurt Wagner saying that there is still a trickle of images that the public Grok account is still producing. So I think whenever Grok says that guardrails are in place, that is a statement we should view with deep suspicion. It continues to be the case that the standalone Grok app, so this is just something that you can download onto your phone and is rated for children 13 plus in the Apple App Store, you can use that to make nude images of women. And if you go onto Reddit, there are now thriving subreddits where people are just competing to see who can make the most explicit porn using Grok. So no, there really are not meaningful safeguards in the way that I think most regulators would want to see here.

• 13:31Kara Swisher?

  And we're regulators right now.

• 13:33Speaker 04

  Well, you know, as you know, we have started to see regulators in a number of countries step up. The countries with the strictest anti porn laws have been the fastest to act. So Grok has now just banned wholesale in Indonesia and Malaysia. But if you look in the European Union, they're planning to take action. The UK is even the United States Senate passed a law designed to prevent some of the harms that we're seeing from Grok, although we'll see if it passes in the House. So this has managed to get the attention of regulators around the world. But, you know, an ongoing question with Elon is what sort of regulation, what kind of fine, what kind of threat actually results in the harm being addressed? Because I think it's just been the case over and over again that that's really hard to do.

• 14:16Kara Swisher?

  He just ignores it. Now, Renee, you've studied CSAM online for years. In 2023, you contributed to a paper that predicted that AI-generated CSAM would be a problem. Looking back, what did you get right and what else didn't you see coming besides Elon's heinous personality?

• 14:32Speaker 03

  Well, I think the willingness to fight about it actually was what has surprised me most about this recent debacle. The, you know, I posted about this on Substack and I got some comment in notes like, well, this is all just a plot to censor X. And I thought, really? Is that where we're going here? We're using the censorship, like the mental stop word censorship is where we're going with this. But, but, but yes, I mean, that is, that is in fact where we're going with this. So I think that it is that term that he has chosen to use for any regulation is censorship. Any barrier of any kind is censorship. Any restriction is censorship. And now we are using that term to apply to the generation

• 15:15Speaker 03

  of images of underage girls, right, is censorship, anything that throttles that. And it works very well, unfortunately, because I think that term, that word, you know, it has a couple of different meanings, right? It refers to legally, it refers to like kind of three different things, right? There's factual claims about speech suppression, saying like, this content was taken down by a private platform. That's one meaning of the word. It's a legal claim about US law, right, a violation of the First Amendment, which doesn't apply to private platforms at all, but nonetheless, they use it in that way. And then it's a normative claim about free speech values. And that is the expansive way that Elon is trying to use it at this point to normalize

• 15:58Speaker 03

  what is happening on his platform. And that is how it is being used. It is the idea that it is an affront to your free speech rights to not be able to generate nude images of other people. And that's what surprised me about it, actually.

• 16:12Kara Swisher?

  Including children.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  Including children.

• 16:13Kara Swisher?

  And so that's kind of a nambler kind of argument.

• 16:16Speaker 03

  Yes. So seeing that, that expansion is where I was like, man, I really, you know, we used to have these fights about content moderation, right? The people who would scream at you that content moderation is censorship. But then they would say, but not, but not CSAM. Okay, that's, that's, that's not censorship. That's fine. And there would be this hard line where they would say like, okay, but we'll concede on this point. And now I'm like, we're not, that, that's off the table now, right? Now that's censorship too. We just, we just took that off the table. We've expanded it to include that now also. And that's because they have to keep expanding that term to encompass any possible conceivable restriction. And that's what you're seeing here. As Ofcom has gone after, Ofcom being the, the British Communication Safety Regulator, as they have gone after Elon, naturally he is reframing this as, oh, they just want to censor free speech on X.

• 17:01Kara Swisher?

  Right. And they're mad at me for this, that and the other thing.

• 17:03Speaker 03

  So that has been what has surprised me. Nothing related to the actual content. I mean, you know, at when Stanford Internet Observatory existed, we used to go and we would present at the Crimes Against Children Conference and we would see examples of in painting, examples of all of the different ways in which, you know, the actual technology has manifested and changed over the last, you know, even just five years, like the, the advances in, in which this kind of content creation has, has shifted. So nothing about the actual technology is surprising here. Nothing about the ways people try to get around guardrails or, but, but the mainstreaming of it and then the application of censorship as a normative claim in this way. And the aggression has been very surprising to see.

• 17:40Kara Swisher?

  So Honey, you developed technology that can flag previously identified images of CSAM. You've developed tools to identify AI created images. But if Grok and X help users create and distribute sexualized images of minors, there's obviously no technical solution for that. Even if tech companies make good faith effort, prevent their chatbots from creating sexualized images in the first place, AI will inevitably exacerbate what was already a very serious problem. Talk about how these AI tools complicate the efforts to fight it. For example, Deepfakes can be used to extort minors. Someone could attempt to make an authentic piece of CSAM, look like it's generated from AI in order to avoid scrutiny from authorities. There's all manner of problems here.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay, so there's many sort of threads to pull on here. So let's see a few things. So first of all, when the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, NCC, has previously identified and categorized CSAM, we extract what's called the perceptual hash, and then we can prevent the re-upload of that content on things like Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and YouTube. That's called photo DNA. That's the work that I worked on with Microsoft back in the day.

• 18:44Kara Swisher?

  Right, and all the companies have been cooperating on that.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, many of the companies, I mean, I would say, you know, it was kicking and screaming, they were cooperating. Now, most of the big tech companies are on board, including X, by the way. But it was not an easy ask, because as Renee was just saying, nobody wanted to open the doors of any content moderation, because the thought was, oh, if we open it for CSAM, well, what else are you going to come for? So it was a fight back in the day, to do this back in the early noughts. But, okay, here we are. The problem, of course, with AI-generated content is that it's not been previously seen. And in fact, you can produce it. I can produce hundreds of images on my laptop every minute. And so there's this flood of content that is coming on the internet that we simply don't have the volume or the capacity to look at every single piece of content and flag it.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  That's number one. Number two is that, okay, maybe if the tech was very, very good, we could deal with the public-facing version of this, things that are posted on X and Facebook. But what you are seeing, as you pointed correctly, is that bad guys are taking innocent photos of children, nudifying them, sending them in things like Snap and Discord and private messaging that we don't have, we're not privy to, and then extorting them. And those kids are taking their own lives, destroying their lives. And it is horrific what we are seeing. And this is happening from organized cybercriminals from around the world. And we have seen story after story after story. And here's the thing is, you know, when you, when you look at these technologies,

• 20:16Speaker 02

  everything we always see, and this has been true of Silicon Valley, as you know, for over 25 years, is safety is always an afterthought. We always try to backfill safety in.

• 20:24Kara Swisher?

  It's not even a thought.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  It's not even a thought. I'm being generous here, right? And you can't backfill safety. You can't do what X is trying to do now, be like, okay, we made a mess. We've normalized this. We've given everybody a taste of it. Now we're going to try to sort of backtrack it. It's not going to work. I'll add one more person, by the way, if I may, to the list of folks that are going after X, which is Australia's e-Safety Commissioner, Julie Inman-Grant, has opened an investigation and they're doing really, has consistently doing really good work to try to hold these tech companies accountable for this. But this is a mess that was both preventable and not unexpected.

• 20:58Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 21:09Kara Swisher?

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• 22:13Kara Swisher?

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• 24:33Kara Swisher?

  So Casey, when it comes to a lot of images, we're actually in a legal gray area in the US at least. The Take It Down Act makes it illegal to publish non-consensual intimate visual depictions, both authentic and deep fake, but it doesn't take into effect until later this year. More importantly, what qualifies as an intimate visual depiction isn't clear cut. The Senate just passed, as you said, the Defiance Act for the second time, which allows victims of non-consensual explicit AI images to sue. But you run into the same issues you do with the Take It Down Act. It's not clear if the AI platforms themselves are liable. Realistically, talk about the legal recourse of victims of Grok's deep fake binge have right now.

• 25:11Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, it's terrible because it places the onus on the victim to go out and get justice for themselves, right? Like, they have already been attacked in public and, you know, suffered in who knows what way. And now, starting in May, there will at least be some avenue through the Take It Down Act through which they can go and try to get some sort of, you know, justice done. But, you know, my fear here is that this is going to be yet another horrible customer service experience from a tech platform where you go onto a website and there's a form that you fill out and you send it in and you just pray that someone answers it, right? So I actually, right now, you know, do not have a lot of confidence that this is going to feel like it is getting justice

• 25:56Speaker 04

  for any of the victims. And if you think about, you know, the sorts of people that are often targeted in these attacks, it is often women. It is often women who are, you know, politicians or leaders of some other type. And these sorts of attacks are used in an effort to silence them and to sort of drive them out of public life.

• 26:13Kara Swisher?

  Speaking of which, Ashley St. Clair, the former conservative influencer and mother of a child with Elon, has sued X over these deep fakes of her and it's countersued, saying she violated the terms of use by actually suing for her abuse.

• 26:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, in particular because she didn't file in the in the northern district of Texas, you know, which is just a frivolous, you know, legal action designed to make this, you know, more expensive and horrible for her. But my point is here, by the time that it comes to go fill out the form on the website that says, hi, like, I've been a victim of a horrible attack, the damage has really already been done here, right? And and there's my fear is that this is just going to drive a lot of women in particular off of social platforms, which of course serves the interests of the fascists who run X.com.

• 26:53Kara Swisher?

  Okay.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  Can I add one more thing, too, is that the ticket down?

• 26:56Kara Swisher?

  Sure, go ahead.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  The ticket down has a 48 hour window. That's an eternity on the eternity on the internet. A half a half life of a social media post is about 90 seconds. The 48 hour window is completely absurd. The content has been online. It's been online for two days and it's spread wildly. There's no taking it down at this point. So the whole thing, I think, is a fool's errand.

• 27:16Kara Swisher?

  So now, Google, as you mentioned, Renee, Apple and Google could have kicked X off their app stores for violating their guidelines so far. Tim Cook and Satya Nadella have done nothing. They've said nothing. Renee, you wrote on threads that the app stores wouldn't do anything. Let's have you read what you posted.

• 27:30Speaker 03

  Okay, here we go. It's too big to regulate. It's not a two bit Nudify app and Elon will howl censorship about second order consequences. He uses the word even when Europeans find him over blue check fraud. Similarly, congressmen that talk a big game about protecting kids with Zuckerberg are afraid of Elon. Josh Hawley and Marsha Blackburn should be speaking up.

• 27:47Kara Swisher?

  So talk about why they aren't and why they're upset about Elon in particular.

• 27:51Speaker 03

  So the so as we were talking about a little bit earlier with this small two bit Nudify apps, there is one use for those apps. We all know what they are for. They are for harassment. That is and they are often made by kind of indie developers. And so when they are, you know, when the mole is whacked, nobody complains, or if they complain, you're not going to hear about it. Nobody really cares. When Elon complains, the world hears about it, right? There is an entire army of people who will come out and will howl censorship right along with him. As I mentioned, again, we have now seen the expansion of that term to cover, you know, your perceived right to generate news of other people. As we've seen, you know, Ashley St. Clair had the audacity to complain.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  She had her blue check revoked. She was demonetized, right? It was immediately made clear that that is the cost of complaining. When you do things to Elon's companies, all of a sudden you get tariffed, right?

• 28:47Speaker 03

  There are people who get their visas revoked because they have the audacity to, you know, to implement fines on X for dishonest business practices, right? When X doesn't adhere to the terms of the Digital Services Act, that becomes an international issue. So the dynamics around regulating X are fraught to begin with.

• 29:06Kara Swisher?

  Because Josh Hawley and Marsha Blackburn have been very vocal on this.

• 29:10Speaker 03

  Right, so I'll get to them in just one second, but the other thing I'll say about this, though, is that the other, the realistic point, though, is that the integration of Grok and X is a challenge, right? So Malaysia and Indonesia block Grok. The challenge, though, is that people use X to communicate. It is a speech platform, and when you block X, you are blocking a lot of other types of speech that have nothing to do with nudification. And that is realistically one of the reasons why, when I say it's sort of too big to block, it has a lot of other issues that go along with it. And so when you block the nudification piece, you have a lot of other kind of second-order effects. But you also have Marsha Blackburn, who, if you've heard her speak in tech hearings, she gets very, very upset about two things. One, AI doing bad things, right?

• 29:54Speaker 03

  You've heard her complain about, you know, where they say things like, they make up accusations about conservatives and things like this. You'd think she'd be very upset about them nudifying women, right? She's a strong proponent of defending women. Two, defending children. These are people who support COSA. Josh Hawley has a very strong Christian populist sentiment in his, in his kind of ethics underlying why he wants to see tech regulated, constantly writing letters to Zuckerberg, asking him to account for himself. And the two of them were entirely silent about this. The person who spoke up was Ted Cruz, who spoke up, but then also promptly posted a photo of himself with Elon, right? So you have this tension here, right? Which is, he knows this is wrong, but also is very, very afraid of being seen as challenging

• 30:37Speaker 03

  Elon, who is a major Republican Party donor.

• 30:40Kara Swisher?

  Right, he's just given $10 million to a candidate in Kentucky, for example. Grok isn't the only AI chatbot with vulnerabilities. You're on DeepPix, obviously, or C-SAM. Obviously, XAI seems to care less, but creating robust guardrails for a chatbot image generator is legally perilous. In order to fix any of the vulnerabilities, you have to find them. That means red-teaming the chatbots. In other words, trying to get them to actually generate C-SAM images in order to identify loopholes and close them. But because of the ways the laws are written, anyone red teaming a chatbot for CSAM might actually be breaking law. Hany, you've testified about this issue in CSAM. What would you like to see to help create a more robust infrastructure to fight it? Because that's one of the things that they

• 31:21Kara Swisher?

  that's the problem here, just like Ashley St. Clair suing and then being sued for suing.

• 31:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:26Kara Swisher?

  Because she's not supposed to sue under the Terms of Service.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  So I do think, you know, we should add another component to this, that as somebody who has worked in the space and has viewed this content as part of my work, it is horrific. You don't want people looking at this. Even the fake stuff is gruesome and is the thing that nightmares are made of. But I do think it is necessary and we do need robust red teaming in. We need mechanisms to make sure. And you're 100% right that, you know, we continue to follow the path of move fast and break things. And, you know, look, some of these things are really hard problems, you know, and nobody's expecting perfection here. Nobody is saying you can never, ever, ever do this. But when you make it so easy, it is really inexcusable. And I think there are many, many things we can do from the guardrails on the training data.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  This is work that Renee has done, semantic guardrails on the input, semantic guardrails on the output, really vigorous red teaming. But the thing, of course, that you know, is that none of this is good for profits. Right? And so the reason, what we need here is really good either liability or regulatory overhead to create an incentive for the companies to do better. Because what we know is left to their own devices, they won't do better. And so it's on us as the public and as regulators and the courts to force that upon them.

• 32:41Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, now they've also created a media narrative. So let's take a step back and analyze the larger implications for the debacle. Elon explicitly created Grok to be, quote, anti-woke. And the issue with the Grok image edit is, besides making it exceptionally easy to create these sexualized deepfakes, it's made it equally easy to use those images to humiliate and harass victims, as you've all noted. This is part of a much larger problem of bullying and denigrating women online. Casey, you've mentioned this is part and parcel of the larger trend of using harassment. As you said, silence women, push them out of the public discourse. I'd love to hear, Eeche, you talk about how this Grok issue fits in this larger systemic issue of harassment and silencing. Casey, you start, and then Renee, and then Hany.

• 33:21Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, like, women have never had an easy time online, right? Like, going back to the earliest days of Twitter, you know, women were also having a terrible time. And, you know, under Jack Dorsey and Dick Costolo, the company also massively under-invested in tools that would just, you know, keep women not just safe, but also just feel comfortable participating. I think the fresh shock here is just that the company itself makes a tool that can strip a woman down to her underwear and shove that into her mentions, and the entire executive leadership team is just laughing it off, right? I mean, it's like, it's like a level of moral depravity I just didn't think we would get to in my lifetime, but now here we are.

• 34:02Kara Swisher?

  Renee?

• 34:02Speaker 03

  I think I would just co-sign that. I think, again, it's the, it's where leadership has gone. It's the, it's the moral degradation on that front. I think we had seen a trend from 2015 with, you know, Gamergate and attitudes around, how should we think about harassment? And the fact that, if you think about free expression, you, there was a balancing act, right? A recognition that certain types of speech push other types of users out of the conversation. And so you wanted to try to maximize that equity to create that environment that allowed the greatest possible number of users to continue to contribute. So, saying, "We're going to allow these people to express themselves by creating nude images of those other people," right?

• 34:47Speaker 03

  Means that those other people are going to exit and go somewhere else. They're going to cease contributing. Their speech is going to be stifled. They are going to be chilled. But it's almost like we've sort of reverted back 10 years into that, into that, that view of equities and conversation, as, as we've just decided that there's a, you know, kind of new sheriff in town, and this one just doesn't care.

• 35:09Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, doesn't care. More than doesn't care. Thinks it's hysterical, honey.

• 35:12Speaker 04

  But, but remember, Cara, remember, you're not allowed to create an account on X that posts the recent whereabouts of Elon's plane, because that would make him unsafe. And it would make him feel like he can't speak. But if you wanted to strip down any woman on, on X, that's fine.

• 35:25Kara Swisher?

  Fair point, Casey. Hany?

• 35:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll add two things here. One is, while women are the brunt of a lot of this, it's also all underrepresented groups have been targeted for years and continue to be targeted, including children. And so that umbrella is actually quite large of people who are being harassed online. The second thing, and I want to sort of reemphasize something Renee said, I always like it when people like Elon Musk talk about free speech, because what he really means is free speech for me and people who agree with me. If you are a true believer in free speech, you want a platform that brings all voices, not just the voices of the people who agree with you. And by allowing this type of content, you are in fact attacking free speech for lots and lots of people. And so if you want to be a free speech person, fine, be that, but let's at least be consistent with that worldview.

• 36:10Kara Swisher?

  Oh, you've noticed the hypocrisy?

• 36:13Speaker 02

  Shocking, isn't it?

• 36:15Kara Swisher?

  Shocking. It's been that way forever, actually.

• 36:18Speaker 02

  I know. And I know I'm stating the obvious, but it's, you know, I sort of really, that hypocrisy in particular really frustrates me, because, first of all, I think there's lots of restrictions on free speech, that's first of all. But this is not a free speech issue. This is absolutely a red herring that is used to silence critics.

• 36:35Kara Swisher?

  That is correct. So the right, obviously, has also been obsessed with pedophilia. I was walking across Union Square Park this weekend, and the QAnon people are still there, still there, still protesting something. Pizzagate and QAnon were about supposed pedophile rings, obviously, so is the Epstein story, though that one is grounded in reality. And then there's the fixation with the drag queen story hour and calling LGBTQIA people groomers, and yet we see this casual attitude towards Elon and Grubbs' exploitation and harassment of minors online.

• 37:05Speaker 02

  It's never been about pedophilia. It's never been about this. That's the point, right? It's, we don't like some people, we're going to tag them with something that seems like it's impossible to ignore, and then when your own guy gets tagged with it, we are silent. This has never been about protecting children.

• 37:19Kara Swisher?

  Right. This is what Elon did to Yoel Roth, and as you all know, Yoel was the head of safety at Twitter before he just quit. And then the minute he quit, Elon attacked him for being a pedophile, which that's his go to. Pedophilia is Elon's go to. Trans or pedophilia is his go to. Renee, you and many other researchers who study online hate, disinformation and misinformation and CSAM have essentially been harassed out of a job by MAGA lawsuits, congressional letters, funding threats, and now deportation threats. In the process, they've guided organizations to research ways to fight CSAM and deep fakes like your former employers, you noted just earlier, the Stanford Internet Observatory. What's the current state of play when it comes to research on CSAM?

• 38:01Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, losing SIO is a really big deal. When I got this, I got a text from a reporter, gosh, it might have been like New Year's Day, I think, talking about some of what was happening and saying, hey, I've got this, I have this tip, this person saying they think they have AI-generated CSAM. I don't know what to do with it. And I said, well, you know, don't look at it.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 38:27Speaker 03

  But then there's this question of like, okay, where do we send it? And, you know, I was kind of DMing with my former colleagues, trying to figure out, all right, well, who can we send this to? We used to have special mechanisms for dealing with it. And obviously, there's like NIKMCC and a bunch of other places. But as far as like researchers who are still in the space, this question of who are the research groups that are, you know, that are still equipped to do certain types of work on this? I think there are different groups that had different specialties that are no longer operational, in part because of the funding cuts and other things where, you know, saying the rather gleeful dismantling of research centers because maybe they studied misinformation

• 39:10Speaker 03

  or maybe they had the audacity to say the 2020 election wasn't rigged and stolen, you know, which it wasn't, right?

• 39:15Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 39:17Speaker 03

  I think some of my...

• 39:18Kara Swisher?

  So it doesn't exist.

• 39:19Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. Well, I mean, SIO shut down as a result of that. I think my, I think I'm heading into year three of the litigation, two court cases against us. And Jim Jordan sent yet another letter to Stanford complaining about researcher's speech. You know, they, they had a dinner, apparently, with... Funny, I have Julianne M. Grant and a few people which Michael Schellenberger and Jim Jordan reframed as some sort of censorship cabal, so they sent another letter demanding emails to try to get to the bottom of that. And so the harassment continues, the stupid conspiracy theories continue. And meanwhile, the question of

• 39:58Speaker 03

  who does important work to actually solve real problems, you know, the centers that used to really specialize in that get shut down.

• 40:07Kara Swisher?

  Do not exist. And they continue to harass someone like you, especially that ever idiotic Michael Schellenberger. Honey, your work has been somewhat controversial, though, in the industry, people that are not Michael Schellenberger, like Mike Masnick, the founder of TechD, feel you're too willing to compromise the privacy rights of everyone who's in order to try to catch people who create or distribute CSAM. Give us your best faith version of your critics' argument, and then explain the trade offs between privacy and child safety online, and why you think they're worth it.

• 40:35Speaker 02

  Well, first, let's acknowledge that there is tension here between privacy and safety. And that's not a strictly online thing, it's an offline thing, too. When I go to the airport, you know, they get to look through my bags and my purse. And so there's a trade off we have to make. And so one position to say is absolute privacy for everybody, and safety is a second, third thought. The other is privacy for nobody, and it's, you know, that's a problem also. So I think reasonable people can disagree here. My position has been this, when we talk about privacy, we should talk about privacy for everybody, not just you and me. Because when I talk about safety measures for children, that is a privacy issue for the children. And so I reject this notion

• 41:20Speaker 02

  that I'm throwing privacy under the bus, right? Now, the argument that I've heard that is, goes something like this, that if you do this, go searching for child sexual abuse material, well, then you will enable people to do X, Y, Z, the slippery slope argument. And the reality is that when we built photo DNA back in the day, we heard those same arguments. And it just was not true. People said to me in my face, you are going to destroy the internet, you will destroy speech, and it was not true. I reject the notion- That we can't have reasonable safety measures and reasonable privacy. This notion that everything absolutely has to be end to end encrypted and nobody gets to do anything, I think, sort of defies the sniff test when it comes to the physical world.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  Nobody would say that when you go to the airport, nobody's allowed to look in your bag because it's a privacy issue. So what I would like is for this to stop being a conversation about privacy and safety because this is an issue of privacy for everybody and a safety for everybody. And I think as we have done in the physical world, we have to find a compromise. And I think that that is not a conversation that has been particularly healthy in the last few years.

• 42:27Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, I don't know why it shifts so drastically when it comes to online child pornography. I find it strange.

• 42:33Speaker 02

  I find it strange too. And here's the thing, I mean, maybe 20 years ago, we could talk about an online world and an offline world. There's no distinction anymore. There's no online and offline world. There's the world. It's one world and we have to start coming to grips with that.

• 42:48Speaker 05

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 42:55Speaker 05

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• 44:51Kara Swisher?

  I'm Kara Swisher, and I like people who say the quiet part out loud. In fact, I love it. That's Tiger Sisters, a new podcast that recently joined the Vox Media Podcast Network. Cherie Brooke Lu and Jean Lu are real sisters who built their careers at LinkedIn and Goldman Sachs. On their weekly podcast, they're giving the next generation practical tips on how to get ahead, how to write emails people actually answer, how to make your LinkedIn profile stand out, and how to keep learning as an adult. It's straight talk about money, career, and relationships every Monday. Follow Tiger Sisters wherever you get your podcasts.

• 45:27Kara Swisher?

  Let's wrap up talking about accountability, or lack thereof, really. There may not be any accountability around this whole ordeal. It boosted Grok's downloads, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that Pentagon will be integrating Grok into its workflows. And nothing happened with Apple and Google around not doing anything. They didn't get any, they didn't get shamed. They were not, they never responded. So what's the takeaway from this whole episode? It'll be just another grimy chapter of the story of X and Grok, like the Mecca Hitler tweets or explicit Taylor Swift deep fakes going viral on X? Or is there any possibility of real change?

• 46:01Speaker 04

  I think that to the extent there's going to be real change is just going to come from outside the United States. I do think that X's existence is just going to become more complicated in more countries around the world. It's going to become more of a headache for Elon. So maybe we'll see some measure of accountability there. If you're looking for any sort of silver lining here, though, I would just say that the fact that Grok has to stoop to these levels just show you how unsuccessful it is compared to its rivals. Like, the introduction of its porn chatbot last year was just explicitly a way to try to boost engagement for what is essentially the fourth or fifth place AI company. So, to

• 46:44Speaker 04

  me, this is just a sign of increasing desperation over there to get something working. And, yeah, so that's what I'd say about that.

• 46:54Kara Swisher?

  And then dress it up like free speech, essentially.

• 46:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:57Kara Swisher?

  So, honey, a review by Wired Magazine shows Grok is creating violent sexual images and videos with minors in them that is much worse than what's being posted on X. We assume the malicious actors are going to find ways to use AI to create illegal deepfakes and CSAM. What sort of AI tools can you imagine would be useful in combating the distribution of these images while respecting these privacy rights you talked about and minimizing false positives that can tar an innocent person's reputation, for example?

• 47:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, first, like everything in cyberspace, this is an adversarial system, right? Like spam, malware, and ransomware. It's a give and take, and it's going to be a back and forth. There are, I mean, if you go to OpenAI's ChatGPT or Google's Gemini, and you try to put in the same prompts that you put into Grok, it won't work. So, we have an existence proof that we can have reasonable measures in place. And this is the way it works. You solve 80% of the problem relatively quickly, and then you start chipping it away with a combination of red teaming and responsible reporting mechanisms. And we, we get to a steady state the way we have with spam. It's a mostly manageable problem these days. But that takes effort, and it takes years and years and years to do that. And it takes

• 48:04Speaker 02

  will, and it takes leadership. And my thing, if I can come back to the question that you asked, Casey, is I think there's, there's one Positive thing that has come out of this, which is the really loud outrage from the media about what is happening. And I think it article after article after article, just really hammering. And I think that's good to see that there is some consequence to this, number one. Number two is, I don't think regulation is going to get us out of this just because it takes so long. And it's so imperfect in the way it's crafted. And of course, the lobbyists are going to beat the hell out of the regulation before it sees the light of day. I think where this starts to get traction is with liability. So putting aside how Elon Musk is threatening people, but

• 48:47Speaker 02

  if we start suing these companies back to the dark ages, they will internalize that cost, and they will make safer products. And so I'm looking to the courts for relief here because I think that's the fastest way to get relief.

• 48:57Kara Swisher?

  You're absolutely right. You have sue the bastards, that's what I said. But Renee, we're talking about very dark, disturbing trends. And the underlying assumption behind your work is that we can have a better internet. So paint a positive picture. Let's imagine a world 10 years from now where there's a momentum towards creating a safer online world, something I've talked about a decade ago. Speaking of which, one of less hate and harassment. What does it look like? What would you need to do? What are the pieces that you need to put in place?

• 49:23Speaker 03

  I mean, some of it is, as Hany mentions, the there is the courts, right? There's the FTC also, which I haven't heard anybody mention. But I know

• 49:31Kara Swisher?

  Oh, please feel free to

• 49:33Speaker 03

  Well, Barron Socha and some other folks are writing about consumer protection powers. I don't know if this FTC will do it again because of the unfortunate, you know, integration of Elon into the Republican Party and the political tensions there. But that's another potential option.

• 49:46Kara Swisher?

  Brandon has an enormous crush on him. It's a little bit untoward, frankly.

• 49:50Speaker 03

  But one of the things that we saw

• 49:52Kara Swisher?

  I may create an image or something.

• 49:56Speaker 03

  There's the, you know, there's the exit versus voice phenomenon, right? Users have voice. They can say, we don't like this. We don't want it. You should, I would hope, see more Conservatives on the platform saying this isn't appropriate, this isn't right, this isn't normal. That's what I would have wanted to see instead of people falling in line behind the censorship, the censorship bullshit. But the other thing is exit. You can leave. There are other platforms. You can go there, right? Threads is a little weird, but it exists. You know, Blue Sky is a little weird in some ways, but it exists. There are, there are alternatives and users can vote with their feet and at some point they're going to have to. And just to say, this isn't normal. And that's the other option. And that's where you just say, there are other places to go. There are other places

• 50:40Speaker 03

  to be. There's Instagram. There's TikTok. I mean, there, which didn't ever actually get banned, right? There's, there's so many different, so many different options. It's not that they're necessarily good, but they, there are alternatives. And that user, user outcry in the United States in particular, has done more to move platforms in various directions with their policies than any regulation, because we haven't had any regulation here. And that is, I think, the last lever really available to say that this isn't okay. We don't want it. It's not moral. It's not ethical and we should be doing something different.

• 51:14Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. Yeah. I do my best by calling it a Nazi porn bar, as you know, all the time. But it seems to have caught on a little bit. So if we take a step back, this episode with Grok is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to issues created by unregulated AI. I'd like each of you to finish up by talking about what else is coming our way? What worries you most? What is the thing you're thinking about next if you had to anticipate? I mean, I think we have anticipated that Elon will do the very worst thing, given the choice. But what worries you the most and what do you think is coming our way? Casey, then Hany, and then Renee?

• 51:48Speaker 04

  To me, the, the worst aspect of Elon's, you know, underinvestment in content moderation and basically just like rejection of it as a, as, as something that anyone should do is that it has just lowered the bar for every other player in the industry. Like Meta is so much worse now than it was before Elon bought Twitter. And it's just because they feel no pressure to do even half the stuff they used to because they look at what Elon gets away with and they think, well, You know, what does it matter if we're going to get 10% of our revenue from literal scams this year, right? Or you look at Roblox and all the issues that they've had with child predators, and they just look at it as, ah, that's just a compliance function. Let's go ahead and do

• 52:29Speaker 04

  the bare minimum. So to me, that's the real issue here is that when there is someone who is so publicly able to get away with the worst things imaginable on their platform, everybody else follows suit because it's cheaper.

• 52:42Kara Swisher?

  That's a very good point. Is there something coming that worries you?

• 52:45Speaker 04

  I mean, the thing that worries me is just that we're already in a world where people have trouble distinguishing fact from fiction. The underlying models continue to get more powerful. There's a huge contingent, particularly on the left, that thinks that AI is fake and a bubble and is all going to collapse tomorrow when, you know, OpenAI can't pay a bill. And so I think a lot of us are just sort of sleepwalking into a future where the media environment becomes ever more challenging and dangerous, and it doesn't seem like many people in power want to do much about that.

• 53:15Kara Swisher?

  Good point. Honey, then Renee.

• 53:17Speaker 02

  Sure. I mean, a lot of things keep me up at night these days, but here's, Bill Gates had this great line many years ago. He said, "We tend to overestimate what tech will do in one year and underestimate what it will do in 10 years." And that's been true for quite a while. I think in the age of AI, that 10 years is probably closer to five years and maybe three years. I think the world is going to look very different in three years. And here's the thing I'm looking at, particularly for 2026, which is the age of agentic AI is upon us. So we, everything we have talked about for the last 45 minutes or so has been humans in the loop, right? Humans are powering this in terms of creating the content and then sharing it and liking it. But soon what we are going to see is fully deployed agentic

• 54:00Speaker 02

  AI, state-sponsored, cyber criminals, individuals will have agents doing the work for them, fully automatic, 24 hours a day, no sleep, no moral, no fear of arrest. And that's going to be a very weird world that we are entering in. And I think cybersecurity in general is going to explode with attacks from agents that are working 24/7 and adapting very, very quickly. And we've already started to see attack from AI-written malware and ransomware. And I think this, the world of agentic AI, more likely than not, in the next 12 to 18 months is upon us. And I think that is going to change an awful lot.

• 54:39Kara Swisher?

  So supersize this. Supersize is a good. And huge problem. Okay, Renee?

• 54:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would concur on that. I think it's the prevalence of fraud. I think the financial industry is beginning to realize that systems it had built using voice as an authenticator, insurers have been using voice as an authenticator. A lot of systems that were, a lot of money invested, thinking that this was going to be secure, the realization it is not secure. And efforts to try to find things that are. The, you know, privacy trade offs with things like biometrics that people are very uncomfortable with, particularly in the hands of governments. And yet, at the same time, the recognition that there have to be mechanisms for credentialing in some way, in part to mitigate fraud, right? So what are those trade offs going to look like? What does that, what does a privacy protecting identity layer look like? Again, recognizing that people don't want the government to control it.

• 55:28Speaker 03

  And yet, the private sector options are not great either. So that's an area that I've been looking at a lot lately and wondering, you know, what on earth happens on that front.

• 55:37Kara Swisher?

  And what worries you the most in this area?

• 55:40Speaker 03

  Um, you know, we're, we've got another election cycle coming up right now. I think those questions around trust and legitimacy are going to play out very heavily in the race. You know, I've never been an AI election doomer. I think there's always been that it's going to matter in some way. We should prepare. We should recognize it as a threat and yet not overreact. And so, again, yet another, yet another cycle coming up, gearing up for that because we have an incredible, you know, real fractured trust environment here. And we've seen the technology advance a lot over the last two years and we're going to see what that looks like going into this next cycle. So.

• 56:20Kara Swisher?

  All right. But we can be sure Leland will do something repulsive. Anyway, I never underestimate his repulsiveness. Anyway, goodbye and thank you so much, Renee, Hany and Casey. It's a really important topic. I'm going to keep coming back to it all year around chatbots, around kids, around suicide, around everything because they're not going to do anything about it. As you said, the media certainly can. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Karen.

• 56:46Speaker 03

  Thanks, Karen.

• 56:46Kara Swisher?

  Thanks, Karen. Thanks.

• 56:52Kara Swisher?

  Today's show was produced by Christian Castor-Russell, Michelle Eloy, Megan Burney, and Kalen Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Catherine Barner. Our engineers are Fernando Aruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.

• 57:27Speaker 01

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