There Are No Girls on the Internet - January 10, 2026


Elon's Grok Sexualized Renee Good’s Dead Body — And He's Laughing About It

Topics
The Big AI Podcast Rejection Amy Poehler's Golden Globe Win | Renee Good Lies Debunked | DoorDash Hoax Exposed - NEWS ROUNDUP

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 6 minutes

Words per minute

165.31

Word count

10,973

Sentence count

490

Harmful content

Misogyny

20

sentences flagged

Toxicity

19

sentences flagged

Hate speech

19

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
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00:00:50.080 I survived nine months in captivity,
00:00:53.240 and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.
00:00:58.760 I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files.
00:01:02.380 Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:01:09.920 These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:01:13.740 Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:01:21.360 If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:01:27.100 Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:01:35.740 Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions.
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00:01:51.160 There Are No Girls on the Internet is a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative.
00:02:03.720 I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.
00:02:09.740 Happy New Year, y'all. Welcome to our first There Are No Girls on the Internet recorded in the new year, 2026.
00:02:16.320 Producer Mike, Happy New Year. Thank you for being here.
00:02:19.200 Happy New Year, Bridget.
00:02:21.320 We made it, got through 2025.
00:02:24.600 I wasn't confident we were going to make it.
00:02:26.900 It was getting down to the wire.
00:02:28.740 You know this about me, but I know a lot of people have strong feelings about the new year and New Year's Eve.
00:02:34.420 I actually really like New Year's Eve.
00:02:36.920 It's one of the only holidays that I can generally get behind.
00:02:40.240 So I always try to make it a thing that I'm going to have a good New Year's.
00:02:45.880 I'm going to go, I'm going to do something fun for New Year's Eve.
00:02:48.620 I'm going to spend New Year's Day watching Twilight Zone reruns on the sci-fi channel.
00:02:54.160 So mission accomplished for 2026, I'm happy to say.
00:02:57.580 All this talk about the Twilight Zone.
00:02:59.720 Unfortunately, that is a segue into what I'm sad to say is like our first conversation of the new year.
00:03:07.340 As I know you know, as you all know by now, Renee Good, poet, mother, wife, was shot and killed by ICE agents in Minnesota this week.
00:03:17.420 The video is horrifying. The response from the administration has been also predictably pretty horrifying.
00:03:24.380 The conversation online has been, I guess, perhaps predictably awash in mis- and disinformation about Good herself, what happened to her.
00:03:33.620 much of it stemming with Trump and the administration himself. So, yeah, it's just
00:03:39.160 bad. And I have to say, this is one of those stories that is like, do you ever have those
00:03:45.760 stories that you see and you're just like, this is enough. I this has broken me. I am done.
00:03:51.760 Yeah, this was a this was a really tough one, a rough way to start the year after being a little
00:03:55.980 checked out from the news for a few days. I completely agree. And I have to say that,
00:04:00.760 you know, the administration lying about a dead woman, really just moments after she's been killed,
00:04:07.140 predictable. Them spreading lies online about it, predictable. The video being horrible,
00:04:13.960 predictable. But something that I did not predict, and I have to give a pretty big trigger warning
00:04:19.400 about this. It's just a rough conversation. There's no other way to put it. I did not predict
00:04:24.500 that a screenshot of the video of Good being shot and killed,
00:04:29.480 an image of her dead body,
00:04:31.560 would be on X,
00:04:33.460 you know, one of our largest social media platforms,
00:04:36.040 with creeps under it,
00:04:38.320 asking for Grok to generate an AI version 1.00
00:04:41.740 of that image that puts her dead body in a bikini. 0.66
00:04:46.080 And Grok complied and generated an image
00:04:49.800 of a dead woman covered in blood
00:04:52.640 in an AI-generated bikini.
00:04:56.360 And I want to pause
00:04:58.280 because I think that that just really says a lot
00:05:01.620 about where we're at right now
00:05:03.580 and how we're all feeling, don't you think?
00:05:05.320 Yeah, it's a pretty gruesome juxtaposition
00:05:10.180 and it does feel kind of like a representative symbol
00:05:16.240 of the lack of compassion and decency
00:05:20.280 that characterizes our moment.
00:05:23.220 And I'm sorry to say,
00:05:25.380 this is not an isolated thing whatsoever
00:05:28.460 because when you search the phrase
00:05:30.200 make her or put her on X,
00:05:33.480 you see how many creeps are posting on X 1.00
00:05:37.560 under images of women and children,
00:05:39.780 in some cases, minors,
00:05:41.220 asking to put that person in a bikini
00:05:43.360 or other sexualized things, 1.00
00:05:45.220 make her look pregnant, 1.00
00:05:46.500 make her look heavily pregnant 1.00
00:05:47.640 or some otherwise sexually suggestive thing 0.63
00:05:50.920 or pose or outfit on their X feeds.
00:05:53.660 Like a user asked Grok to undress an image
00:05:56.620 of a 14-year-old actress on the platform.
00:06:00.020 Pretty grim.
00:06:01.060 And I've seen a lot of reporting about this
00:06:03.280 that talks about it being, you know,
00:06:05.420 sexualized, non-consensual AI-generated images,
00:06:08.540 which it is.
00:06:09.560 It sounds weird to say,
00:06:11.080 but I think it's important to note
00:06:12.620 that it's not just sexualized images
00:06:15.560 that are non-consensual of women and children.
00:06:18.140 But also, like that Renee Good photo,
00:06:20.900 it is also dark, hateful, 0.98
00:06:24.520 sick sexualized images of women and kids. 0.99
00:06:27.340 Like, it would be bad enough 0.98
00:06:28.520 if we were only talking about sexualized images.
00:06:33.140 It's not just that, right?
00:06:34.960 It accepted a prompt to add a swastika bikini 0.53
00:06:37.440 to the photo of a Holocaust survivor,
00:06:39.600 and it also engaged with requests to represent women
00:06:41.900 in scenarios that looked like
00:06:43.320 they had been physically assaulted.
00:06:44.620 So it's not just sexualized images.
00:06:48.300 It is, but it's also like deeply disturbed images of women and children.
00:06:55.280 Sounds like X.
00:06:57.020 It's X, but it also goes beyond what's happening on X because what we're seeing on the platform X is just part of it.
00:07:03.820 Because Grok is available on X, but it's also a standalone app in the App Store.
00:07:08.800 And as the indicator points out, that app has also been used to generate sexual images of children aged 11 to 13.
00:07:16.060 This is according to information from the Internet Watch Foundation.
00:07:19.560 So for folks like me who have basically stopped using X and maybe you're thinking, I've not been there in a while.
00:07:27.060 What's Grok? What's going on with Grok?
00:07:28.840 Well, Grok is X's AI chatbot.
00:07:32.060 But it's a little different than chatbots that you might be used to, like Claude, notably with intention.
00:07:38.120 So Grok has been designed to sort of be an edgelord chatbot. 0.92
00:07:43.800 Because Elon Musk is a huge loser creep, Grok has basically been designed by and for huge loser creeps.
00:07:51.740 So while Chachipiti and Claude obviously have their issues that we talk about on the show all the time, 0.98
00:07:56.660 Grok is distinctive for being uniquely awful.
00:08:00.020 Remember there was a time where Elon Musk was trying to tinker with Grok to make it less woke?
00:08:04.420 And at that time, Grok started declaring that it should be called Mecca Hitler.
00:08:08.980 Remember that?
00:08:10.000 And I want to talk about this because I have been getting very frustrated seeing these headlines that say things like,
00:08:15.940 Grok has apologized for sexualizing images of young girls.
00:08:19.820 And I want to start there because Grok is X's chatbot.
00:08:24.020 But guess what?
00:08:25.360 Grok is not sentient.
00:08:26.740 Grok is not a person.
00:08:27.500 Grok doesn't do anything that humans do not tell Grok to do or program Grok to do.
00:08:34.420 Humans like Elon Musk built Grok and run it as a commercial service, making it available for other humans to use and do things with.
00:08:41.600 And right now, those other humans are using Grok to undress women and girls to create sexualized images of children, i.e. what we call crimes, criminal behavior.
00:08:56.480 Let's take a quick break.
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00:11:03.940 When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months.
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00:12:09.640 At our back.
00:12:14.460 So Bridget, how did we get here?
00:12:16.540 So this has really hit a fever pitch right now this week, but it's not really new, especially on X.
00:12:22.860 So I want to back up a little bit and talk about sort of how we got to this moment.
00:12:26.620 We've done a few episodes about AI-generated sexualized images that took off on X.
00:12:32.060 It happened to teen Marvel star Sochal Gomez.
00:12:35.620 Gomez was targeted with deep fake images that also flooded X.
00:12:38.980 When this happened, she was only 17, so she was a minor.
00:12:41.780 And she's spoken about this publicly. She was essentially told there was nothing that could be done, that she just needed to make peace with it, make whatever emotional peace with it that she could because nothing could be done about it.
00:12:53.820 Also, folks might remember that in January 2024, AI generated images of Taylor Swift that originated on the platform Telegram, where Telegram had been running a channel that was kind of like a marketplace for celebrity deepfakes, where users would request and trade deepfake images of celebrities.
00:13:12.740 Images of Taylor Swift were created on that Telegram marketplace.
00:13:16.540 And then those images made their way to X, where they really took off.
00:13:20.540 telegram is sort of like a smaller niche alternative space and so you know it was they
00:13:26.040 were being traded there but when they hit x which is arguably a more mainstream online space
00:13:31.480 that's when they really took off back when this happened in my opinion x did not really handle
00:13:37.960 this well which i think we can understand as a precursor for what's happening today
00:13:41.840 they initially tried to manage it by just blocking people from being able to search
00:13:46.920 Taylor Swift's name. However, when you put quote marks around Taylor Swift's name, it's you were
00:13:52.800 able to search her just fine. So that didn't even really work. And notably, that solution doesn't
00:13:59.140 offer any kind of protection to a woman who's not named Taylor Swift, right? Like that is a that that
00:14:04.580 it didn't work. But even let's say that it did work for the sake of argument. The only person
00:14:09.400 that that would conceivably even work for is Taylor Swift. So certainly not any kind of a
00:14:14.260 meaningful solution to this like deep problem. But the Taylor Swift situation was notable because
00:14:20.400 back then these images would typically originate elsewhere like a more niche alternative platform
00:14:25.960 and then make their way to X where they would enjoy more reach and visibility. Grok essentially
00:14:32.300 allowed anybody to use natural language to do whatever they wanted to images of women and girls
00:14:38.080 on X. So you've got the introduction of Grok, plus, as friend of the podcast Kat Tenmarge points out
00:14:45.300 in her deeply researched, deeply reported media outlet Spitfire News, which everybody should be
00:14:50.640 reading, Musk also dissolved Twitter's trust and safety counsel when he took over at Twitter,
00:14:56.420 right? He fired 80 percent of the engineers who work on issues regarding child exploitation. So
00:15:02.040 again, that is a kind of very specific choice that has led us to the moment that we're in now.
00:15:07.640 And yet none of this stopped X from rolling out what it called spicy mode on Grok's mobile video generator, which basically includes a feature to produce sexual content.
00:15:19.700 So, you know, think about that for a minute, because you've got a platform where the majority of people who work on sexual exploitation issues have been fired.
00:15:27.860 You've got an issue already with users generating and spreading non-consensual AI generated images on your platform.
00:15:35.620 You're not really doing a good job of dealing with it.
00:15:38.700 And against that backdrop, you say, you know what we're going to do?
00:15:43.040 We're going to double down on adult content generation where folks can make adult content right on our platform.
00:15:50.280 I guess I just have to say, like, it's not it's not none of this is surprising.
00:15:54.040 This is like very predictable. And it's not like any of this came out of nowhere or just happened in a vacuum.
00:15:59.920 Right. These are very deliberate and I would argue decisions with very foreseeable results from Elon Musk.
00:16:08.040 And that is what's led us to this moment where we're at right now.
00:16:11.260 Yeah. All of those decisions add up to a very consistent picture of not prioritizing doing anything about this kind of content and in fact liking it and thinking it's cool.
00:16:22.540 I mean, I'm glad that you put it that way because we can't talk about what's happening without talking about what we know about Elon Musk, who is someone who, in my opinion, has made it clear that this is the kind of thing that he likes. He likes sexualized content.
00:16:39.340 There was a whole flurry of reporting about the way that he was publicly engaging with anime adult content on the platform, right? So, you know, there's nothing wrong with enjoying adult content, don't we all? But I think it needs to be said that Elon Musk is somebody who is totally fine with publicly engaging with content like this on the platform that he runs, and he is the key decision maker on that platform.
00:17:06.540 So like that's unusual. And I want to highlight that because I just don't think that we need to pretend like this is not who Elon Musk is and this is not what Elon Musk is about.
00:17:15.820 Elon Musk has long been a toxic decision maker. And I think had a lot of people in power, people in media, other folks in tech, had they not kind of framed this and treated this as, oh, a brilliant genius with a few acceptable quirks and rather talked about it like they probably should have, which is chaotic, volatile leadership decisions that are bad for business.
00:17:40.280 Had they seen Elon Musk's public behavior that way, we genuinely might not be in the situation that we're in now where, you know, sexualized images of children are flooding a mainstream social media platform, which I think, you know, this is not the Twilight Zone, but I think most people would agree is not great.
00:17:58.660 Yeah, you know, you mentioned earlier that, you know, lots of people, many people enjoy adult content in other contexts. The thing that's so unacceptable about the situation is that Elon wants to have it both ways with X, that it's like the public town square where ideas are debated, or at least that's what he says, and also a place for adult content.
00:18:25.040 Like, you can't have both. Like, even pornography enthusiasts, I think for the most part, agree that, like, it shouldn't be out in the public square where children are. Like, there should be some separation there.
00:18:38.700 Yes. And there's nothing wrong with consensual adult content, but you can't have a platform where just by engaging there, you might be setting yourself up to be sexualized against your consent in this way. Right. So like a town square doesn't work. If when I post there, somebody could say, put her in a bikini and that's totally normalized and fine. I'm not going to feel comfortable or safe showing up to that town square.
00:19:06.800 So you've got a town square where people cannot equally speak up, equally show up. And so, again, I always say this. This is not just a tech issue or a gender issue or a sex crimes issue. It's all of those things. But it's also a speech issue and a democracy issue.
00:19:22.000 If we were to take Elon Musk, liar that he is, let's just take him at his word and say he wants to build a town square where people can safely show up, all people can safely show up and engage in a marketplace of ideas.
00:19:33.840 If when I walk into that marketplace of ideas, people can strip me naked without my consent, I am not able to safely and equally and equitably show up.
00:19:41.380 And so it really, as we increasingly use platforms like this to engage in things like civic engagement, discourse around politics and social issues and democracy, if we cannot all equally show up, we've got a big problem.
00:19:54.200 Totally. And if they continue entertaining the idea that it's supposed to be like a town square where people can talk about things, if people are supposed to be exchanging ideas, sort of a foundational principle I think that everyone agrees is important for that to be effective is some sense of mutual respect with people exchanging the ideas and listening to each other even if they don't disagree.
00:20:20.080 and that's just like not even there's no shred of that on x it's just like a place where
00:20:25.480 absolute disrespect is normalized and like who who would want to go there i continue to be baffled
00:20:31.820 that like so many people continue to be there yeah i i'm with you i sort of get it because
00:20:40.440 you know twitter was the platform that i had built up the majority of my sort of whatever
00:20:45.700 you want to call it impact voice before i had a podcast and i i get you know being like i don't
00:20:51.580 want to i don't want to lose that i don't want to lose the communities that i've built here the
00:20:54.700 voices i've built here whatever i totally get that however i can only speak for myself personally
00:20:59.320 the community that i built on twitter before elon musk took over and again not that pre-musk twitter
00:21:06.340 was all peaches and cream i had issues with that too but that was largely like black voices black
00:21:11.380 folks if you if you are somebody who was at all like minoritized if you are a woman a person of 0.98
00:21:17.060 color a queer lgbtq it is uniquely awful to show up on twitter and so i had to one day say the 0.85
00:21:24.180 people that i care about the voices that i care about they're not really showing up on twitter
00:21:27.440 either so what am i clinging to right so i i on the one hand i get it like people who and also i
00:21:32.580 think independent journalists like the the thing that twitter had over other social media platforms
00:21:39.320 before musk took over was that that's where a lot of journalists and decision makers and editors
00:21:44.280 hung out there was a time we did a podcast about it episode about it we'll put it in the show notes
00:21:48.100 there was a time where just by having one just by getting like retweeted by lena dunham or something
00:21:54.000 you could get a book deal right and so i understand that it was this place where
00:21:58.780 power was built political power was built there you know you you had like black lives matter and
00:22:05.620 And me, too, really taking off on the platform. I get all of that. But I think for me, I've had to kind of make peace with the fact that that's that's gone and probably not coming back.
00:22:16.480 And so why would I want to subject myself to exactly the kind of disrespect that you just described to sort of enjoy like a facade of what once was right at a certain point?
00:22:27.460 You have to just let it go. And I get that people, their temperatures may vary on this, but I personally have let it go.
00:22:34.740 Yeah, I hear you. Okay, so getting back to this issue at hand, what do we know about the content on X and particularly this problem of non-consensual sexualized images?
00:22:50.600 So the scope of the issue with AI-generated non-consensual sexualized images on X has
00:22:56.620 gotten way worse. Friend of the podcast Kat Tenbarge reported this past summer about how
00:23:01.660 users had been using Grok to use AI to make it look like women had semen on their faces.
00:23:07.540 Just really awful stuff. Quick side note, we will put it in the show notes. Y'all should really
00:23:12.880 read Kat's piece at her outlet Spitfire News called How Grok's Sexual Abuse Hit a Tipping
00:23:18.280 point. One of the things that she puts really well is just describing what it is like to have to
00:23:24.160 search for and confirm the absolute worst content on social media platforms. She describes it as
00:23:30.860 being half journalist, half the internet's garbage collector, which I really, really identify with.
00:23:37.140 So really shout out to people who have been working to help us understand the scope of this
00:23:42.700 issue. And that work has gotten a lot worse because of all the things we've talked about on
00:23:45.780 the show, you know, less transparency from platforms, less back end information. But people
00:23:51.160 are still doing this work and it's not pleasant work. So shout out to the people and the researchers
00:23:57.420 and the journalists who have gotten us this information. But when it comes to what we know
00:24:02.400 about this content on the platform right now, CopyLeaks, which is a content analysis firm,
00:24:07.880 reported that on December 31st, ex-users were generating roughly one non-consensual sexualized
00:24:14.400 image per minute. That is wild to me. According to Bloomberg, during a 24-hour analysis of the
00:24:22.600 images Grok's account posted to X, the chatbot generated 6,700 every hour that were identified
00:24:29.260 as being sexually suggestive or nudifying. This is according to Genevieve Oh, a social media and
00:24:34.860 deepfake researcher. The other top five websites for such content averaged 79 new undressing images
00:24:41.700 per hour in the 24-hour period from January 5th to January 6th, O found. So we don't have to
00:24:48.320 pretend that X is the only game in town when it comes to this kind of content. But as you can see
00:24:53.300 from that information that Genevieve O pointed out, the problem is much bigger on X as compared
00:24:59.140 to other platforms. And I know that we've been talking a lot about celebrities in this conversation,
00:25:05.120 but just to be super clear, it is not just celebrities. It is also regular people and
00:25:10.680 children who are not public figures who have just posted their images to x that this is happening
00:25:15.880 to that's right and as we were doing research for this episode uh the guardian spoke to phd
00:25:21.500 researcher at dublin's trinity college ai accountability lab nana and wachuku uh whose
00:25:27.380 research investigated the types of requests that users were submitting to grok so we looked into
00:25:32.060 that research a little bit uh really interesting important stuff i'm so glad that there are people
00:25:37.140 like her out in the world producing this research
00:25:41.920 so that we can have some visibility
00:25:43.900 and just like quantify the scale of these problems,
00:25:47.220 especially in this era when X has shut down the backend API,
00:25:52.100 like you mentioned, and visibility for those of us in the public is so limited.
00:25:58.000 So I didn't talk to her, but I just reviewed her research.
00:26:01.460 I like read it.
00:26:02.780 And what she did was she looked through,
00:26:06.100 she created a sample of posts of people sending messages to grok and then studied what are the
00:26:12.760 contents of these messages that people are sending to grok and what she found was that almost three
00:26:17.360 quarters of all of the requests were direct non-consensual requests for grok to remove or
00:26:22.960 replace clothing she showed the guardian some of the grok created photos that she collected as part
00:26:29.200 of the research and the guardian confirmed that dozens were pictures of women including celebrities
00:26:34.620 models, also stock photos, and a bunch of women who were just random, ordinary women,
00:26:40.960 not public figures, who were posing in snapshots.
00:26:46.220 That's such a high proportion, like three quarters, almost three quarters of requests
00:26:52.220 to Grok were this category of non-consensual sexualized imagery.
00:26:57.760 That's like the majority use.
00:26:59.760 That's the main thing people are asking Grok to do during this time period.
00:27:03.060 and her research really
00:27:05.600 I think paints a portrait of the
00:27:07.700 ecosystem around these images as well
00:27:09.720 because she wasn't just looking at the content of the images
00:27:11.920 but how people were interacting with them
00:27:13.780 and she finds that
00:27:15.320 the users are really interacting
00:27:17.940 with each other
00:27:19.460 around these non-consensual
00:27:21.480 sexualized images that they're creating
00:27:23.160 sharing them with each other
00:27:25.220 and then like iterating on them
00:27:27.200 being like oh add this
00:27:29.880 take that away blah blah blah
00:27:31.340 asking Grok to make changes to images that were shared by others.
00:27:36.220 So it's like a whole community and ecosystem around what they're doing here.
00:27:41.480 Yes, and I think that's important to note
00:27:43.420 because think about how you have to feel about something
00:27:47.500 to be comfortable having public conversation about it in this way, right?
00:27:53.040 It's not just make this image.
00:27:55.480 It's, oh, change this, change that.
00:27:57.460 Oh, I like this.
00:27:58.220 Oh, you did that to her, LOL.
00:27:59.500 Like it is you get what I'm saying, right? That like the fact that people are like comfortable having public conversation about what they're doing to these women and girls non-consensually, I think is is unique and telling.
00:28:12.040 Oh, 100%. I mean, I think that's a big part of the appeal for them and for Elon as well, right? It's like the rudest, most juvenile assholes have forced their way to the grownups table and are reveling in their like fart jokes and like gross sexual jokes that like aren't even funny are just like rude and crass.
00:28:42.040 And the fact that they are like normalizing this and like asserting that it is now acceptable, I think is a big part of the appeal for for Elon and team. 0.98
00:28:56.160 Yes, that's exactly what I was getting at. Let's not forget that Elon Musk is the same person who said that he wanted to start a university called the Texas Institute of Technology and Science, a.k.a. tits.
00:29:10.420 it's just the worst it's not even a good joke it's not even it's it's like when you were a kid 0.98
00:29:16.960 and you would put boobs into the calculator and turn it upside down and then show it to the person
00:29:21.100 next to you and i feel like i don't know if you were anything like me i feel like when people
00:29:25.320 would do that even in like seventh grade the person that you were showing that to would be
00:29:29.440 like really yeah it was like it never got a laugh it was kind of funny in like third grade that you
00:29:36.480 could make your calculator say boobs but like by seventh grade come on uh yes yeah so but that's
00:29:45.120 like i think that's a lot of the people who are really using x and not just like random accounts
00:29:49.500 several posts in the trove that uh that noachaku showed to the guardian uh had received tens of
00:29:58.480 thousands of impressions that came from premium blue check accounts so you know premium accounts
00:30:04.780 that people pay for on X with more than 500 followers
00:30:07.280 and 5 million impressions over three months
00:30:09.300 are eligible for revenue sharing
00:30:10.940 under X's eligibility rules.
00:30:12.840 So I think we should remember that too
00:30:14.640 as part of this conversation,
00:30:15.880 that these people aren't just exchanging these photos
00:30:19.420 with each other for lulls
00:30:21.720 and whatever weird sexual gratification
00:30:23.560 they get out of it,
00:30:24.480 but also there's potentially money
00:30:26.420 on the other end for them,
00:30:27.660 where X is directly paying some of these accounts
00:30:31.640 for this content that is generating engagement.
00:30:34.780 cool platform you've got here, cool marketplace of ideas, more like marketplace for AI-generated
00:30:41.760 non-consensual sexualized images. Yeah. And, you know, it's a real high quality art that they're
00:30:49.220 producing here. There was one Christmas Day post that they reviewed where an account with
00:30:54.240 over 93,000 followers presented side-by-side images of some random woman's butt with the 0.94
00:31:01.840 caption told grok to make her butt even bigger and switch leopard print to usa print second pick 0.99
00:31:07.720 i just told it to add cum on her ass lmao it's like that's what they're doing right they're 0.99
00:31:15.660 you know we we aren't even getting into like the environmental resources that grok is consuming to 0.99
00:31:21.920 make this kind of content uh and it's like three quarters of what people are asking grok to do like
00:31:27.720 this is this is what grok does now uh post on january 3rd uh represented which was the guardian
00:31:34.900 said was representative dozens that they reviewed captioned an apparent holiday photo of again some
00:31:41.660 unknown woman uh the caption was at grok replace give her a dental floss bikini uh and within two
00:31:50.520 minutes rock provided that image and satisfied the user requests uh and that was just typical
00:31:58.480 of a lot of these yeah and what makes me sad is that i think the common sense advice that i meant
00:32:05.360 to put here is i don't think people should be posting their images on social media if this is
00:32:10.300 going to be how they're used i don't like to say stuff like that because one i think that we're at
00:32:16.420 the point where you don't even need to post your images for this to happen. Like, you know, you
00:32:21.080 could post a totally normal picture of yourself and then it gets taken and manipulated in this
00:32:25.920 way. But two, I don't like that advice because I just think that women and people should be able
00:32:31.480 to show up online and not have this happen to them. I understand, like, I feel some responsibility
00:32:39.240 that this is the part of the conversation where I should be saying, I don't think people should
00:32:42.580 be posting their pictures, but I hate
00:32:44.500 saying that because people should
00:32:46.580 be able to post their pictures on social media. People should
00:32:48.560 be able to safely show up on these platforms
00:32:50.580 and the fact that they're
00:32:52.680 not, I don't like putting the onus
00:32:54.580 back on people and saying, don't
00:32:56.720 do this totally commonplace
00:32:58.580 normal behavior for using
00:33:00.640 technology in 2026 because
00:33:02.540 some creep could use it to make a horrifying
00:33:04.880 image of you. I just,
00:33:06.600 I feel like we don't have, like, if we're
00:33:08.620 the fact, we'll talk about
00:33:10.540 more about this in a moment, but the fact
00:33:12.580 that these platforms aren't doing anything to meaningfully address this i hate that in the
00:33:17.880 absence of them actually doing anything what people keep saying is like don't post your pictures don't
00:33:23.100 post your pictures and that just it doesn't work yeah it's a real conundrum because i totally get
00:33:29.820 what you're saying you don't want to it kind of feels like giving in being like oh well i guess
00:33:34.640 we just like won't post anything uh but then at the same time it's not safe to post there
00:33:40.280 I do think it's worth pointing out that like, you know, sometimes it's convenient for us to talk about like social media platforms because there's a lot of stuff that they all get wrong in common.
00:33:52.940 This does seem to be like a particular problem of X or certainly it's not exclusive to X, but like the scale and magnitude and demonstrated lack of concern put X in a category by itself.
00:34:07.780 That is absolutely correct. And really, it's nothing new for X. It's just the culmination of all the bad decision making that from Musk that I described earlier. But X has just long been a platform where illegal child sexual assault material content flourishes.
00:34:23.040 There is a fantastic piece by one of my favorite journalists, Samantha Cole at 404 Media, called Grok's AI Sexual Abuse Didn't Come Out of Nowhere, where Cole writes,
00:34:31.800 This is the culmination of years and years of rampant abuse on the platform. Reporting from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the official organization social media platforms report to when they find instances of child abuse material, which then reports to relevant authorities, shows that Twitter, and eventually X, has become one of the leading hosts of CSAM every year for the last year.
00:34:53.040 last seven years. In 2019, the platform reported 45,726 instances of abuse to the cyber tip line.
00:35:00.420 In 2020, it was 65,062. In 2024, it was 686,176. These numbers should be considered with the
00:35:10.880 caveat that these platforms voluntarily report to the cyber tip line. And more reports also mean
00:35:16.400 stronger moderation systems can catch more child sexual abuse material when it appears.
00:35:20.920 But the scale of the problem is still apparent. Jack Dorsey's Twitter was a moderation clown show much of the time. But moderation on Elon Musk's X, especially against abusive imagery, is a total failure.
00:35:34.060 So I think that speaks to exactly what you were just describing. I don't want to make it seem like X is the only problematic platform here because it's definitely not. And we've talked quite a bit about Facebook and all the ways that they have knowingly abused women and children.
00:35:48.860 However, the size and the scale and the scope of the problem is much worse on X.
00:35:55.620 And I would argue that the way that it's publicly handled by leadership is much worse on X.
00:36:00.900 Like, y'all know one of my biggest, like, life enemies is Adam Mosseri, who runs Instagram.
00:36:07.040 I really just do not like him.
00:36:08.240 He rubs me the wrong way and gives me the ick.
00:36:10.160 But even Adam Mosseri is not using Instagram to joke about the ways that platform is not a safe space for women, right?
00:36:20.540 Like, we don't see him posting stories, laughing about it and posting sexual jokes about it.
00:36:26.780 We do see that from Elon Musk.
00:36:28.520 And that is different.
00:36:29.880 Yes.
00:36:30.140 What did he post the other day?
00:36:31.080 It was like when this story started breaking and people started complaining about it, he posted a toaster in a bikini, just like totally making fun of the situation.
00:36:41.760 Yeah, I think that's totally part of the conversation.
00:36:43.860 So you have Elon Musk joking about it.
00:36:46.320 Per indicator, Musk has shared at least 30 posts celebrating Grok and talking about how great Grok is while this has been going on between January 7th and January 8th.
00:36:56.440 He has not appeared to express remorse himself for what's been going down, right?
00:37:01.200 So, like, he's been joking about it and then talking about how great Grok is and how happy he is with Grok while this is happening against this backdrop.
00:37:10.100 And so, I'm sorry, even the ghouls who run Facebook would have the sense to be like, let's not post jokes about it, right?
00:37:18.600 Let's not talk about how great of a job we're doing.
00:37:20.940 They do a little bit of that, but not the way that Elon Musk is doing.
00:37:23.700 even even those ghouls would have the the insight not to do this yeah it's you really can't conclude
00:37:32.140 anything other than like he likes it and he thinks it's cool and he sees this as grok doing what it's
00:37:40.000 supposed to do so one question that i've seen presented a lot is is this like how is this
00:37:45.340 allowed which is the question that i started this this whole conversation with when i was thinking
00:37:49.560 you about it. Like, how is this allowed? Yes. And I think that like really fits into the broader
00:37:54.000 category of like, what the hell? How is this allowed? How is this going on? And it's just
00:37:58.480 like an acceptable thing. Like, what the hell? So so please, Bridget, how in the world is this 0.82
00:38:03.260 allowed? I wish I had the answers. I'll tell you what I know. So this kind of content pretty
00:38:09.420 blatantly violates XOX's own policies, which prohibit sharing illegal content such as child
00:38:15.560 sexual abuse material. But as Wired points out, it could also violate Apple's App Store and
00:38:21.980 Google's App Store guidelines. Wired writes, Apple and Google both explicitly ban apps containing
00:38:27.620 child sexual abuse material, which is illegal to host and distribute in many countries. The tech
00:38:32.380 giants also forbid apps that contain pornographic material or facilitate harassment. The Apple App
00:38:37.760 Store says it does not allow overtly sexual or pornographic material, as well as defamatory,
00:38:42.600 discriminatory, or mean-spirited content, especially if the app is likely to humiliate,
00:38:47.780 intimidate, or harm a targeted individual or group. The Google Play Store bans apps that
00:38:52.400 container promote content associated with sexually predatory behavior or distribute
00:38:57.280 non-consensual sexual content, as well as programs that contain and facilitate threats,
00:39:02.760 harassment, or bullying. So when I read that, I say, oh, well, Grok, especially the standalone app,
00:39:09.800 is clearly, as the research that you just laid out
00:39:13.580 demonstrated, is clearly doing that.
00:39:15.680 So how can this app stay on the platform?
00:39:18.040 There also is some precedent for this
00:39:20.200 because Google and Apple have both removed
00:39:22.420 Nudify apps from their platforms
00:39:25.000 because they were not allowed.
00:39:26.480 However, the standalone Grok app
00:39:29.000 is still available on both Google and Apple.
00:39:32.300 Boy, if I was a developer of some other Nudify app
00:39:36.720 and my app had been removed and Grok was still there,
00:39:39.800 i'd be kind of mad about that it really seems like a double standard right like maybe those
00:39:45.660 people who made those awful nudify apps should add a chat feature and then then they could get
00:39:52.680 back because then they would basically be the same as x yes so when i was doing research for this i
00:39:58.620 was like well what are people what are contrarians saying because i in my mind i'm like who could
00:40:02.140 defend this people are saying things like well it's not like crock is only used to make this
00:40:07.960 kind of content from the research it seems like it's being it's like a big part of the of like
00:40:12.300 the use you know yeah like like 75 almost and so he was like well you know that's like saying that
00:40:18.900 we should ban email because people could use email to distribute illegal illegal content
00:40:24.680 and i thought not really no it's not like that not really you know uh it's it's sort of like
00:40:34.660 Like the way, if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bike.
00:40:38.260 That is like, I feel like we have a couple of like axioms that like rule the show.
00:40:45.120 If my grandmother had wheels, she would be a bike is one of them.
00:40:48.580 Yes, it's so beautifully communicates the like non sequitur-ness of an argument.
00:40:56.660 I don't think that's a word, but you know what I mean.
00:40:58.700 I know what you mean.
00:41:01.960 More after a quick break.
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00:44:15.780 Let's get right back into it.
00:44:17.280 okay so the big question that i had going into this was i understand it's against x's own policies
00:44:30.020 it seems to be against google and apple's policies as well isn't this against the law like genuinely
00:44:36.220 isn't this like a legal behavior i mean my understanding was that yeah child sexual
00:44:41.900 abuse material is illegal you're it's illegal to make it it's illegal to distribute it it's illegal
00:44:47.240 to have it to possess it so like what the hell so big warning caveat neither of us are lawyers
00:44:55.540 however the framing that makes sense to me is that this is as you said criminal behavior in my
00:45:03.060 opinion this is a criminal enterprise and elon musk is benefiting from that criminal enterprise
00:45:10.140 So the same way that if any other kind of illegal enterprise, even if I were not making drugs, but I was I bought my house with illegal drug money, I would be complicit in an illegal enterprise per the government.
00:45:24.400 Right. And so we are reaching out to an attorney who has been on the show before, who specializes in cybercrime.
00:45:30.320 Stand out to Carrie Goldberg. We love her, friend of the show. But again, I'm no lawyer, but this seems like a criminal enterprise to me. And I don't understand why Elon Musk is not facing consequences for this.
00:45:43.560 enough abuse which is an anti-child sexual abuse organization has documented that 45 states in the
00:45:50.440 united states have enacted laws that criminalized ai generated or computer edited child sexual abuse
00:45:56.220 material while five states and notably my own state or my own jurisdiction where i live my own
00:46:02.660 jurisdiction dc have not as of august 2025 and so if you are listening to this in most states in the
00:46:12.360 country if you were doing what these people are using x to do you would be you would have legal
00:46:19.360 trouble and if you were financially benefiting from that you would have legal trouble so i do
00:46:24.420 not understand like genuinely i do not understand how this is not something where elon musk would
00:46:30.000 face legal consequences because he has been financially benefiting from the trade and
00:46:37.160 creation of child sexual abuse material i genuinely like i have no idea i don't either
00:46:42.780 i have seen a lot of people talking about this and a lot of analogies being used and i think
00:46:48.540 analogies can often be helpful but they can also be kind of dangerous in like making things seem
00:46:54.540 more similar than they are one analogy in particular that i've seen is people comparing it
00:46:58.600 to guns and being like oh well if a gun shoots somebody is it the manufacturer's responsibility
00:47:05.580 something aside the ethical responsibilities there we have the second amendment in this
00:47:10.200 country that puts guns in their own category so i find that analogy to be like really unhelpful
00:47:18.460 in trying to make sense of like how this is legal yeah as far as i know there's no right to bear
00:47:28.020 child sexual assault material in this country so as far as i know no i think uh you know
00:47:34.620 Madison wanted to put it in, but Jefferson was like, nah.
00:47:40.160 Another question I've seen is what about the Take It Down Act?
00:47:44.200 So folks might remember that Donald Trump signed the Take It Down Act into law,
00:47:48.860 which makes it illegal to knowingly host or share non-consensual sexualized images.
00:47:52.880 And even though there has been some, you know, mounting legal conversation,
00:47:58.960 the thing there is that companies do not have to respond until a victim reports it.
00:48:04.120 Right. And so if nobody reports it, the company doesn't have to do anything. And so that if you're if you're wondering, like, wasn't that signed into law? Why is that law not being triggered? That's why. Because companies don't have to do anything until somebody speaks out and reports it.
00:48:18.100 Uh, that's useful. Thank you. Um, so what has the response from X been? I mean, we talked about
00:48:28.100 Elon sort of joking about it. Has there been any other sort of response from whoever is running the
00:48:35.140 show at X? Well, I like, that was like a deep seated sigh. I am loathe to say this. So again,
00:48:46.400 you might have seen headlines about how grok is apologizing for and taking responsibility for this
00:48:55.180 this was the statement that grok generated quote i deeply regret an incident on december 28th 2025
00:49:01.540 where i generated and shared an ai image of two young girls estimated ages 12 and 16
00:49:06.420 in sexualized attire based on a user's prompt it was a failure in safeguards and i'm sorry for any
00:49:12.180 harm caused. Well, again, Grok is not sentient. And setting it up like a non-sentient piece of
00:49:18.240 technology could take the blame for something. One, it makes me feel like I'm smoking crack.
00:49:24.920 Two, it just lets the humans responsible off the hook because the humans, as we said,
00:49:30.380 are doing nothing. Elon Musk is laughing about it and celebrating how great Grok is and how great
00:49:36.820 grok's features are while this is going on and elon musk notably has not shared any kind of
00:49:44.040 remorse himself about what's happening as far as i know as of recording and so i just really
00:49:50.040 reject anything that that would even suggest that like grok can't take responsibility because grok's
00:49:56.960 not human grok's not sentient elon musk is the person that runs twitter we have elon musk has
00:50:02.060 expressed no remorse yeah i love the efforts to like keep the responsibility on the humans and not
00:50:10.820 pretend that this piece of software that was built by humans run by humans is constantly
00:50:17.700 being tweets by humans uh somehow it should be the the target of blame here right like the
00:50:26.140 Accountability goes to the humans who are running it and making money off of it.
00:50:32.040 Yes, exactly. And mind you, we talked about this on the show a while back.
00:50:38.240 Elon Musk is the same man who in 2024, when Google's Gemini chatbot was making kind of biased outputs. 0.58
00:50:46.640 Remember, if you asked it to generate, I think, Alexander Hamilton, it would make it black.
00:50:51.460 And remember that whole conversation? 0.84
00:50:53.820 Oh, yeah, I remember that.
00:50:54.760 Elon Musk tweeted about this nonstop. He said it was so alarming, the fact that Gemini's chatbot
00:51:02.360 was coming up with these biased, kooky results. He said it was very alarming, and he posted about
00:51:07.740 it nonstop. So when his own platform, I would argue, is doing something much worse, generating
00:51:13.640 illegal child sexual abuse material, sexualized images of kids, no, nothing to say. No real
00:51:20.600 problem with that. He did, I will say, he did say that anybody who uses Grok to create anything
00:51:27.200 illegal will face consequences, which they haven't. But he himself has been laughing about the way that
00:51:32.760 his tool has been used and joking about it. As Kat puts it, the reality is that X has not taken
00:51:38.240 this seriously, as one of Grok's user-generated posts might seem to suggest. Instead, Musk has
00:51:44.440 encouraged, laughed at, and praised Grok for its ability to edit images of fully clothed people
00:51:49.740 into bikinis.
00:51:50.880 Gronk is awesome, he tweeted,
00:51:52.600 while the AI was being used
00:51:54.100 to undress women and children. 1.00
00:51:55.960 Make it look like they're crying. 0.82
00:51:57.440 Generate fake bruises 0.76
00:51:58.460 and burn marks on their bodies
00:51:59.780 and write things like
00:52:00.780 Property of Little St. James Island,
00:52:03.260 which is a reference
00:52:03.840 to Jeffrey Epstein's private island
00:52:05.560 and sex trafficking.
00:52:07.580 When Kat herself reached out
00:52:09.700 to X for comment,
00:52:11.520 she got back their automated email
00:52:14.120 that just says,
00:52:15.160 legacy media lies.
00:52:17.000 And I mean, I think that really says it all.
00:52:18.660 As she put it,
00:52:19.740 There's no reason to make X and Musk seem more concerned about this than they really are.
00:52:24.960 They've known about this happening the entire time, and they made it even easier to inflict on victims.
00:52:29.640 They are not investing in solutions.
00:52:31.220 They are investing in making the problem worse.
00:52:32.980 And I completely agree.
00:52:34.740 Yeah.
00:52:35.980 And I do want to point out that response that she got from X, Legacy Media Lies, because I've seen this a lot lately, and it drives me up the damn wall that, like, she reached out with a specific concern about a specific issue.
00:52:49.740 looking for a comment and she just gets back like vague boilerplate that kind of sort of invokes
00:52:57.180 conspiracy uh that does not address it at all and i feel like we're seeing more of that and i
00:53:06.380 really hate it so much and i also hate how they in a lot of cases media outlets will let them
00:53:15.620 get away with it also not for nothing kat tenbarge is not legacy media kat tenbarge runs her own
00:53:22.580 independent news outlet called spitfire news so not only is it a wild response to send it don't
00:53:28.900 even apply it don't even make sense no it don't be like if i reached out for a comment and they're
00:53:32.540 like nbc sucks it's like well i don't work for nbc so that's a non sequitur yeah it has nothing
00:53:38.400 to do with anything other than like conspiracy smokescreen the truth is unknowable and also 0.96
00:53:45.860 probably somewhere in the middle yes okay so we've been talking about this for a while here
00:53:52.180 we're pretty worked up what's gonna happen next here we we gotta we gotta get this under control
00:53:59.980 what's gonna happen at this point not clear uh if i'm being honest i don't think the united states
00:54:06.720 is going to do much of anything at all.
00:54:08.160 We have not really heard a lot of anything
00:54:10.740 from anybody with political power to do anything.
00:54:14.800 Kat spoke to Dr. Mary Ann Franks, 0.99
00:54:16.920 who drafted the template for laws
00:54:18.960 against non-consensual distribution of intimate images,
00:54:22.180 who said,
00:54:23.260 the FTC has made it clear they're fighting for Trump.
00:54:26.060 It's actually never going to be used
00:54:27.660 against the very players who are the worst in this system.
00:54:31.100 X is going to continue to be one of the worst offenders
00:54:33.240 and probably one of the pioneers
00:54:34.960 of horrible ways to hurt women so i i'm i usually try to find like optimism i don't have a lot of
00:54:43.440 optimism for how the united states is going to handle this i don't think anything's going to
00:54:47.020 happen i totally agree and i think it's also worth pointing out that the administration's
00:54:54.800 support of x based on his support of them uh is i have to imagine also related to apple and
00:55:03.320 Google's ongoing decision to keep X in their app stores
00:55:07.180 because were they to kick it out,
00:55:10.280 I think they would have very good reason
00:55:12.800 to believe that the administration
00:55:14.500 might come after them for it.
00:55:16.840 So I think this is a good example problem
00:55:21.960 of the ways that this lawless administration,
00:55:27.500 which is run by personal grievance and loyalty,
00:55:30.840 is changing our society and impacting major decisions that make it less safe for all of us
00:55:39.200 even without the government having to do anything just the the idea that they might
00:55:44.500 come after private companies making decisions that they don't like exactly and yeah it's just
00:55:53.640 in the context of having had a whole like national conversation about pizzagate q anon
00:55:59.740 this this like the way that our government and tech leaders are coalescing around doing nothing
00:56:08.380 and um like supporting people creating child sexual abuse material like the conspiracy is
00:56:18.420 happening in plain view right like i mean like like isn't this isn't this the thing yeah it's
00:56:25.040 a good point it's like right there we have all these states passing like age verification laws
00:56:29.820 for social media to protect the children uh which research says aren't effective
00:56:36.360 but like here's the thing right in plain view that is happening that we're all seeing we're
00:56:42.140 all talking about it and it's just crickets here in the united states from the government well i
00:56:48.700 will say our play cousins over in europe are not happy uh because earlier this week a spokesperson
00:56:54.880 for the European Commission criticized the sexually explicit non-consensual images that
00:56:59.900 Grok is creating, calling them illegal, notably appalling, and saying they have no place in
00:57:05.100 Europe. Days later, the EU ordered X to retain all internal documents and data tied to Grok
00:57:10.840 through 2026, extending an earlier directive to preserve evidence relevant to the Digital
00:57:15.600 Services Act, even as no new formal probe had been announced. Regulators in the UK,
00:57:20.200 India and Malaysia have also signaled investigations into the platform so the United States ain't gonna
00:57:26.560 do shit however it sounds like other countries are like actually yeah we don't think it's cool
00:57:31.860 that people can just create illegal sexualized content of minors and we have some questions 0.99
00:57:37.780 about it yeah they it's good that they're asking they should get on that and just as you and I
00:57:45.060 were sitting down to record, we saw this news that X had announced the ability to create images
00:57:50.400 with Grok was going to become restricted to only users who pay for X premium. We don't even need
00:57:56.960 to discuss this as a fix to the problem. This is obviously not a fix to the problem. It just means
00:58:01.960 that the ability to make this kind of non-consensual sexualized content is going to be a premium
00:58:06.500 service that people can pay for. So not only will it not address the problem, it just means that
00:58:11.720 It's a money-making opportunity for X.
00:58:14.620 And so as we were sitting down to record,
00:58:16.560 the British government is not impressed by this as a fix.
00:58:19.940 They told The Guardian,
00:58:21.360 this move simply turns an AI feature
00:58:23.700 that allows the creation of unlawful images
00:58:25.860 into a premium service, which I completely agree.
00:58:29.740 And something that I was wondering about is,
00:58:32.200 you know, I know that X has really been struggling
00:58:34.960 in terms of making money, retaining users
00:58:37.320 for all the reasons that we talked about,
00:58:39.180 advertising, all of that.
00:58:40.200 But these kinds of AI services are pricey. They're expensive. And so one of my questions is, I wonder if, like, maybe X had been mulling a decision like this over for a while as a way to cut costs associated with Grok.
00:58:55.440 This is just my theory. I don't have any, you know, this is just speculation. But I wonder if they had already been thinking about this and they were like, oh, we can just say that we're doing it as a fix to this AI sexualized images problem.
00:59:07.160 But really, we were thinking about doing this as a cost-cutting solution all along.
00:59:12.220 I wondered the same thing.
00:59:13.900 You know, we've been seeing a lot of news stories about the big AI players, including OpenAI,
00:59:19.520 really struggling to get costs under control and make revenue.
00:59:26.100 And I mean, I have to imagine that creating all of these images with Grok is costing X a fortune.
00:59:33.920 uh so yeah i wondered the same thing if that move was something that they had maybe been thinking
00:59:42.300 about already and they thought that maybe they could uh what did you say liberate two birds with
00:59:47.300 one stone oh uh free two birds with one key i so i you know the expression kill two birds with one
00:59:54.220 stone i don't know where i heard it but someone was like oh another way to put that is free two
00:59:59.620 birds with one key and i thought what a nice what a nice way of like reframing like why am i killing
01:00:04.300 birds here well because you're hungry so you know once you free them freeing them to eat them and
01:00:12.520 put them on my plate ultimately you know i'm fired up i'm angry this is a tech podcast but i don't
01:00:22.200 see this as just a tech issue i really think it is a cultural issue people who have been reporting
01:00:27.620 on deepfakes since before we had a word for them, folks like Samantha Cole, have pointed this out.
01:00:32.540 Cole writes, in 2018, less than a year after reporting the first story on deepfakes,
01:00:37.520 I wrote about how it's a serious mistake to ignore the fact that non-consensual imagery,
01:00:42.200 synthetic or not, is a societal sickness and not something companies can guardrail against
01:00:47.140 into infinity. Users feed off of each other to create a sense that they are the kings of the
01:00:51.980 universe, that they answer to no one. This logic is how you get incels and pickup artists. It's
01:00:57.340 how you get deepfakes, a group of men who see no harm in treating women as mere images and view
01:01:03.120 making and spreading algorithmically weaponized revenge porn as a hobby, as innocent and timeless
01:01:08.840 as trading baseball cards. I wrote at the time, this is what's at the root of deepfakes and the
01:01:14.420 consequences of forgetting that are more dire than we can predict. And I think that really says
01:01:20.340 it all to me. I've been thinking a lot about the societal and cultural rot at the heart of this
01:01:29.860 issue, and I keep coming back to it again and again and again. This is not a fully fleshed out
01:01:37.340 idea, but I think the way that AI is being used just really illustrates that. When Google released
01:01:45.520 Nano Banana Pro, their AI generator that makes like very realistic looking AI images,
01:01:51.220 I couldn't stop noticing how so many of the examples of images that people had used it to 0.98
01:01:56.660 create were just conventionally hot women in like yoga pants and workout attire and things like that 1.00
01:02:03.260 doing mirror selfies. If you take a look at the Nano Banana Pro subreddit, at least when it first 0.99
01:02:08.780 started it was just post after post after post of ai generated women and it just reminds me that
01:02:17.980 you know the moment that these image generators were first becoming mainstream
01:02:22.180 some men were talking about how they wanted to use them to create fake only fans models and they
01:02:28.200 were really trafficking in this idea that doing that would be taking the power back from women
01:02:33.060 and like taking power from women and giving it back to men right even though side note that's
01:02:38.140 not really how OnlyFans works, but whatever. But I think that impulse was very telling, right? If
01:02:43.120 women are able to build some economic agency by consensually creating their own sexual content, 1.00
01:02:48.800 there's resentment for that, right? And so it's not just, I won't pay for that, I won't engage 1.00
01:02:53.300 with that. It becomes, I will use AI so that she cannot have that agency at all. Or worse,
01:02:58.920 I will use AI to undress women without their consent. You know, it's just like these prompts 0.90
01:03:04.300 on XA, make her, put her. It's all about controlling women and stripping us of whatever 0.99
01:03:12.040 agency we do have in society. And I think Samantha Cole really nails it that it's not just a tech 1.00
01:03:20.260 issue. It is a culture issue. It is a societal rock issue that I think we can and should be
01:03:28.240 holding companies accountable to creating guardrails for this kind of thing. But this is not
01:03:33.100 a problem that you can guardrail out of being an issue unless we address that rot. And something
01:03:39.040 that you said earlier, Mike, that, you know, this idea that, you know, platforms like X are going to
01:03:45.980 be our town square where ideas can be debated and all of that. I don't believe that about X
01:03:52.720 anymore. However, it is true that social media platforms in 2026 are increasingly just like
01:03:59.320 where people show up, if you want to engage civically, if you want to build a business.
01:04:03.460 You know, in 2026, if you want to be civically engaged, engaged in your democracy in robust
01:04:09.020 ways, build businesses, showing up on social media is just part of that, right?
01:04:14.160 And so if the advice that we give to women is don't show up on these platforms, what 0.97
01:04:19.560 we're actually saying is don't show up civically, don't show up in your own democracy, it's 0.54
01:04:23.880 not safe.
01:04:24.360 And I think that that's part of what's going on here. 1.00
01:04:26.780 It's a way of erasing women from civic and public life by doing this. 0.55
01:04:34.580 And I think that, like, you know, Elon Musk is obsessed with talking about free speech.
01:04:39.260 If I don't show up to the town square because somebody is going to yank my top off if I do, what about my speech?
01:04:44.240 Is that not speech being suppressed?
01:04:47.420 And I completely agree with Samantha Cole that I think all of this is really coming from the same place. 0.94
01:04:53.240 A desire to live in a world where women exist primarily to be consumed, controlled, and stripped of whatever agency we have managed to claim over our own bodies and lives. 0.99
01:05:04.580 And I think until we confront that reality, Samantha Cole is exactly right, that I don't think any amount of technical safeguards alone, even though we should be advocating for them, is going to fix that problem. 0.98
01:05:19.520 Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi?
01:05:22.640 you can reach us at hello at tangody.com you can also find transcripts for today's episode at
01:05:27.420 tangody.com there are no girls on the internet was created by me Bridget Todd it's a production
01:05:32.100 of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer Tari Harrison
01:05:36.840 is our producer and sound engineer Michael Amato is our contributing producer I'm your host Bridget
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