X (formerly Twitter)’s integrated AI, Grok, has been used to abusively edit women and children’s photos to show them in bikinis or naked.
Any user could reply to someone else’s photo asking Grok to non-consensually change the outfit to something revealing.
When women spoke out against this sexual harassment, they were told by users that this is the consequence of posting photos online.
Elon Musk (the richest capitalist in the world and owner of X and pictured opposite) initially called the backlash “Any excuse for censorship”, before limiting the feature to paid accounts.
This clearly highlights the priorities of the capitalists to preserve their profits over the safety of people. Following a backlash from multiple governments, X’s European headquarters in Dublin agreed to prevent the AI from being used for “nudification”.
However, before this point there were over 200 reports to state authorities of child sexual abuse material being circulated on X.
While AI has potential to be used to help workers, generative AI (like Grok) are, instead, profiting off of the exploitation of workers; beyond the exploitation of women and children by generating nude images. To train such algorithms, underlying training data must be secured, so to gather this data, underpaid content curators in the neo-colonial world are employed for this task and ruthlessly exploited. Furthermore, internet content shared by small artists and authors is frequently stolen and used to train AI models.
Theft and exploitation
This has led to AI companies such as Anthropic being sued for stealing published works. However, the many workers and artists unable to afford legal action against mega-rich tech companies are, under capitalism, powerless to stop AI theft.
For those who have been sexually exploited by AI, there is also limited recourse, and once the images have been created and shared online, they are often still saved somewhere online forever.
While the UK, Ireland, and other countries are reluctantly taking steps to prevent AI tech being used to exploit women and children, in reality little can be done while the technology is privately owned. If we want to stop AI being used for harm, we need the technology to be under democratic, public ownership.
By doing this, we can use AI to support workers rather than exploit them, and prevent systems being used to victimise women and children.
Workers employed in AI need to organise and join trade unions to harass their collective power and stand up to abusive bullies like Elon Musk.
If you are a tech worker looking to join a union the following are a good place to start:
Communication Workers’ Union Ireland – www.cwu.ie
Communications Workers’ UK – www.cwu.org
Financial Services Union Ireland – www.fsunion.org
Other unions like Unite, SIPTU and Connect may also be organising in the sector – look them up online and join.