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There was a time when people who didn’t look too closely into matters believed Elon Musk to be some sort of genius inventor. That was never true.
These days, he’s infamous for his “concern” about white birth rates, his endorsement of fascists, for ruining Twitter, and for how his grok AI being used to generate nude images of women and children.
That last part is where Meghan Markle and Prince Harry come in.
Musk’s xAI is suing to stop a Minnesota law against these “nudification” programs from going into effect. Yikes!
Call him out!
In a statement on their Sussex.com site, Meghan and Harry absolutely skewered the former trillionaire without even mentioning his name.
“Big Tech has taken shocking steps to limit restrictions on or accountability for these objectively predatory A.I. product features,” they correctly observed.
“Most recently, ahead of the Minnesota law to ban ‘nudification’ apps going into effect tomorrow, the trillionaire leader of the tech company responsible for X’s Grok, sued the state of Minnesota to stop the law from going into place,” Harry and Meghan described.
Though they did not name Musk, he was briefly valued by credulous investors at $1 trillion due to one of his hodgepodge companies, SpaceX, going public under relaxed restrictions. He is no longer a trillionaire by any measure.
And, of course, his program is now the most infamous for producing nude renderings of women and especially of children. These are not harmless drawings, but realistic-looking depictions of real people. These images are used to harass or exact revenge upon these victims.
Meghan and Harry mused about “why someone would try to stop a ban on AI technology producing deepfakes of people and children in the nude without their consent.”
They then described multiple groups in the US and UK, including children. All of whom had filed suits against xAI’s grok.
“The company is mitigating risk to their bottom line instead of aggressively responding to the clear evidence their product features are enabling predators to prey on women and children,” the couple observed.
Meghan and Harry did not personally sign the statement, but instead posted it to their website.
As for the laws against “nudification” programs, those are in places like Minnesota, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, and California. Obviously, there are many states — and countries — to go in passing similar legislation.
Some ‘child safety’ laws do not protect, but laws against this tech will
Why are they bringing this up?
Well, first and foremost, because Meghan and Harry have dedicated a lot of their activism to promoting child safety.
These “child internet safety” laws that keep passing in many cases do not make children safe — only more isolated.
(Any law that requires people to show an ID and “prove” their age to be online is, at best, poorly conceived. At worst, it’s just a surveillance ploy. It will not keep kids safe, but it will make everything worse for adults.)
But Meghan and Harry aren’t talking about online censorship or mass surveillance. They’re talking about how Musk’s company is suing to stop Minnesota to outlaw “nudification.”
To hear the xAI legal team tell it, the laws against “nudification” are oppressing free speech.
It would be easy to imagine a law that, by accident or malicious design, restricted actual art. Remember, real art is just a drawing, and has no victim. Feeding a photo of your coworker or your ex or a literal child into a program that renders a nude or further sexualized image of them is very different.
But Minnesota’s law does not appear to be overbroad. We are not legal scholars, but it is our understanding that the laws target the underlying tech, making it clear that they’re not sending shock troops to raid art museums.
That seems to be an issue that critics have with Minnesota’s law — that it targets this tech.
All AI-generated slop images are bad. They’re environmentally destructive and they are repulsive, all built upon stolen images and stolen art. Just like how slop writing and slop answers are bad (and inaccurate).
But we can acknowledge that slop that directly ruins lives as a tool of revenge and harassment is worse. Meghan and Harry are right to call out Musk.
