Caroline Haskins, writing for Wired (News+ link, in case Wired’s paywall blocks you):

Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok is being used to flood X with thousands of sexualized images of adults and apparent minors wearing minimal clothing. Some of this content appears to not only violate X’s own policies, which prohibit sharing illegal content such as child sexual abuse material (CSAM), but may also violate the guidelines of Apple’s App Store and the Google Play store.

Apple and Google both explicitly ban apps containing CSAM, which is illegal to host and distribute in many countries. The tech giants also forbid apps that contain pornographic material or facilitate harassment. The Apple App Store says it doesn’t allow “overtly sexual or pornographic material,” as well as “defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content,” especially if the app is “likely to humiliate, intimidate, or harm a targeted individual or group.” The Google Play store bans apps that “contain or promote content associated with sexually predatory behavior, or distribute non-consensual sexual content,” and well as programs that “contain or facilitate threats, harassment, or bullying.”

Over the past two years, Apple and Google removed a number of “nudify” and AI image-generation apps after investigations by the BBC and 404 Media found they were being advertised or used to effectively turn ordinary photos into explicit images of women without their consent.

But at the time of publication, both the X app and the standalone Grok app remain available in both app stores. Apple, Google, and X did not respond to requests for comment.

I just browsed through the last five minutes of replies generated by Grok on Twitter/X, and saw both seeming CSAM (all young Asian women) and just outright hardcore pornographic video (that, for what it’s worth, seemed to feature adults, whether real or generated).

It was a barely concealed secret before Musk bought Twitter that Twitter had an active dark underbelly of pornographic content. But you had to know where to look for it. It really wasn’t something you might just stumble upon. Now you get hardcore porno just by looking at the profile page for Grok. And any user can send any photo they want to @grok and tell it to change or remove the subject’s clothing and change their pose. Lord only knows what people are generating privately using the standalone Grok app.

If a new social network app launched featuring this content, it surely would be removed from the App Store and Play Store. X is seemingly untouchable for political reasons.

Update: Recall that Apple pulled the Tumblr app from the App Store in 2018 for similar content.

Maybe “next year” meant “next next year”?

(They’re still accepting $100 deposits for pre-orders.)

Caitlin Callenson’s courage in the face of insane danger is just remarkable.

This 2021 post from Jason Fried is a good chaser to his “The Big Regression” this week (which I linked to yesterday):

Much of the tension in product development and interface design comes from trying to balance the obvious, the easy, and the possible. Figuring out which things go in which bucket is critical to fully understanding how to make something useful.

Shouldn’t everything be obvious? Unless you’re making a product that just does one thing — like a paperclip, for example — everything won’t be obvious. You have to make tough calls about what needs to be obvious, what should be easy, and what should be possible. The more things something (a product, a feature, a screen, etc) does, the more calls you have to make.

This isn’t the same as prioritizing things. High, medium, low priority doesn’t tell you enough about the problem. “What needs to be obvious?” is a better question to ask than “What’s high priority?” Further, priority doesn’t tell you anything about cost. And the first thing to internalize is that everything has a cost.

Obvious / easy / possible is a good filter through which to create — and critique — designs. To borrow an example from yesterday: old-fashioned analog light switches are exemplars of obviousness; most new-fashioned smart switches are exemplars of possibility.

Juli Clover: Language learning app Duolingo has apparently been using the iPhone’s Live Activity feature to display ads on the Lock Screen and the Dynamic Island, which violates Apple’s design guidelines. According to multiple reports on Reddit, the Duolingo app has been displaying an ad for a “Super offer,” which is Duolingo’s paid subscription option. […]