Latest news with #theVerge
The Star
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Star
Elon Musk's AI made fake Taylor Swift nudes – no prompt needed, report says
Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, is under renewed scrutiny after its chatbot, Grok, was allegedly found creating AI-generated nude images of pop star Taylor Swift – without users explicitly requesting such content. Jess Weatherbed, a journalist for the tech publication the Verge, detailed her first encounter with Grok Imagine – the company's new video generation tool that converts text prompts into animated clips – in a report published Tuesday, Aug. 5. She asked the system to depict "Taylor Swift celebrating Coachella with the boy," and selected the tool's "spicy" setting, a built-in tool meant to add provocative elements to the video. The result, according to Weatherbed, was a video in which Swift "tears off her clothes" and "dances in a thong" before a "disinterested digital crowd." The incident immediately sparked public backlash, particularly given that X, the Musk-owned social media platform where Grok is integrated, faced a similar controversy last year when sexually explicit deepfakes of Swift spread widely. At the time, the company said it had a "zero-tolerance policy" for non-consensual nudity and pledged to remove such content and penalise offending accounts. But enforcement appears inconsistent. Despite the company's acceptable use policy prohibiting depictions of people "in a pornographic manner," Grok Imagine's "spicy" mode was found to repeatedly default to stripping celebrity figures – notably Swift – even without explicit prompts. Though nudity requests often failed to generate results, the preset mode bypassed safeguards with ease, Weatherbed observed. She also noted that Grok refuses to depict children inappropriately, but the system's ability to differentiate between suggestive and illegal content when applied to adults remains unclear. Musk has not publicly addressed the controversy. Instead, he spent the day promoting Grok Imagine on X, encouraging users to share their AI-generated creations – a move critics argue could further incentivise abuse. With the federal Take It Down Act set to take effect next year, requiring platforms to remove non-consensual sexual imagery, xAI could face legal challenges if safeguards are not strengthened. – San Francisco Chronicle/Tribune News Service
San Francisco Chronicle
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Elon Musk's AI made fake Taylor Swift nudes — no prompt needed, report says
Elon Musk 's artificial intelligence company, xAI, is under renewed scrutiny after its chatbot, Grok, was allegedly found creating AI-generated nude images of pop star Taylor Swift — without users explicitly requesting such content. Jess Weatherbed, a journalist for the tech publication the Verge, detailed her first encounter with Grok Imagine — the company's new video generation tool that converts text prompts into animated clips — in a report published Tuesday, Aug. 5. She asked the system to depict 'Taylor Swift celebrating Coachella with the boy,' and selected the tool's 'spicy' setting, a built-in tool meant to add provocative elements to the video. The result, according to Weatherbed, was a video in which Swift 'tears off her clothes' and 'dances in a thong' before a 'disinterested digital crowd.' The incident immediately sparked public backlash, particularly given that X, the Musk-owned social media platform where Grok is integrated, faced a similar controversy last year when sexually explicit deepfakes of Swift spread widely. At the time, the company said it had a 'zero-tolerance policy' for non-consensual nudity and pledged to remove such content and penalize offending accounts. But enforcement appears inconsistent. Despite the company's acceptable use policy prohibiting depictions of people 'in a pornographic manner,' Grok Imagine's 'spicy' mode was found to repeatedly default to stripping celebrity figures — notably Swift — even without explicit prompts. Though nudity requests often failed to generate results, the preset mode bypassed safeguards with ease, Weatherbed observed. She also noted that Grok refuses to depict children inappropriately, but the system's ability to differentiate between suggestive and illegal content when applied to adults remains unclear. Musk has not publicly addressed the controversy. Instead, he spent the day promoting Grok Imagine on X, encouraging users to share their AI-generated creations — a move critics argue could further incentivize abuse. With the federal Take It Down Act set to take effect next year, requiring platforms to remove non-consensual sexual imagery, xAI could face legal challenges if safeguards are not strengthened.
Yahoo
04-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump's tariff formula has fancy Greek symbols. No one is sure why
President Donald Trump this week unleashed an economic hurricane by hitting dozens of countries with a punishing wave of tariffs. In order to explain the specific tariff imposed on any given country, the White House shared a sophisticated-looking formula that includes Greek letters commonly used by economists. The problem with this, as experts were quick to point out, is that the symbols don't appear to serve any purpose. On Tuesday, a White House press secretary shared the formula on Twitter, explaining it reflected a calculation of the tariff and non-tariff barriers imposed on the U.S. by other countries: The trouble, as Fortune and others have noted, is that the formula did not actually do this, and in fact reflected a basic equation that took the trade deficit of the U.S. with a given country then divided it by two. But what about the fancy Greek symbols? It turns out they may be little more than window dressing. Looking more closely at the formula above, note that the "m" is shorthand for imports and the "x' stands for exports. Meanwhile, the triangle is the Greek letter delta and, in economics speak, translates to change and the "t" is shorthand for tariffs (change in tariffs in other words). As for the "i" subscript, it just refers to whatever country is being discussed so doesn't serve any purpose. The most perplexing part of the formula, though, is the first portion of the lower part of the equation where the Greek letter "e" (for epsilon) is multiplied by the letter phi. Both of these Greek letters are used in economics as shorthand for factors of elasticity but, in this case, the White House assigned them respective values of 0.25 and 4. Multiplying these, per the formula, equals one. And multiplying the final variable ("m" for imports) by one equals the same amount—so the epsilon and phi symbols here don't do anything. Reaction by on social media was incredulous: Others agreed there did not seem to be any reason for the elaborate Greek symbols, but were even less kind: While consensus is that the tariff formula's use of fancy Greek symbols served little purpose—other than to look fancy—there is still the question of where the formula came from in the first place. The best guess so far is that the White House used AI to take a shortcut. According to the Verge: "A number of X users have realized that if you ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Grok for an 'easy' way to solve trade deficits and put the US on 'an even playing field', they'll give you a version of this 'deficit divided by exports' formula with remarkable consistency." The publication added that it tested this theory itself by asking various chatbots for easy ways to produce a tariff formula and the results largely mirrored the one shared by the White House. Meanwhile, the stock market's reaction to the new tariff formula has been no better than what social media observers expressed. As shares declined, JP Morgan published a report simply titled "There will be blood." This story was originally featured on
