Musk's ‘Spicy Mode' AI porn generator is not just dumb, it's dangerous

Sydney Morning Herald

15 hours ago

Things are happening fast in the world of generative AI, and in the world of online safety. But where the two collide, particularly in the increasingly concerning regulatory environment of the United States, things seem to have shifted practically overnight.
We're approaching a place where major Western governments are blocking access to educational material for young girls to learn about their own bodies, while AI scans images of those bodies without consent to make models for generating salacious material on demand. A place where mentions of homosexuality and transgenderism are scrubbed from scientific documents and pressure campaigns stop artists making money off their original erotic content, but where the world's richest man can sell you deepfakes of Taylor Swift's bare breasts for $45 a month.
It's easy to imagine a horror-scenario future for our culture, which is already dominated and regulated by an internet that's increasingly privatised and vulnerable to the whims of governments and tech oligarchs. A scenario where certain kinds of sex – like anything that might empower women or queer people – are deemed woke and get buried. While other kinds – like the ability of men to see any woman they want naked, while she's powerless to do anything about it – are fine.
And it's all the easier to imagine as the constant procession of AI grossness and conservative government mandates make us so apathetic that barely anybody seems to point it out any more.
Last week, Elon Musk's xAI rolled out a public version of its image-generation platform Grok Imagine, with a marquee feature being its ability to turn any generated image into a short video.
But true to form for Musk's 'free speech absolutist' X platform, which has a history of allowing, gestating and amplifying harm towards anyone of a different gender, sexuality, skin colour or belief system to the Tesla founder himself, this is mainstream AI video with a recklessly immature difference: an optional 'Spicy Mode' ensures the video output is suggestive or explicitly sexual in nature.
The idea is that the user (and they must be a paying user, with access to Grok Imagine starting at $45 a month), can ask for an image of any person they want in any situation they want, and then hit the Spicy button to turn it into soft porn. X is filled with videos of users celebrating and sharing their creations.
As you might expect, almost all the generated videos are of women, with videos commonly showing them removing their tops and shorts to expose their naked bodies, rolling around while ripping at skintight suits, or messily eating ice cream that Grok seems to think should become liquid the second it's touched by anything. The videos are uncanny, with moments of photorealism but also strange physics, impossible behaviour, weird shiny textures and other common AI video oddness, plus awful audio. They're also extremely unimaginative, despite the name of the product.