Comment by b112
18 hours ago
I think the fair nuance here is, an administration which used Executive Orders to force guardrails, meaning US companies must retain them, even if they might want to drop them now.
And on top of that, with low/no guardrails, people call you a child pornographer(grok), so the public is also against it. Yet mysteriously few complain about Chinese open models being child pornographers.
So even if your goal isn't ethical, but just fiscal, it's reasonable to say there are two standards. And to complaint in some way.
I don't think banning is going to work, that's just silly. And over the next few years, everyone and their dog will have local GPU compute to train locally. People have home labs, the bar isn't that high, and eventually large text datasets will escape from Anthropic and other companies, allowing for comparable training.
It's a genie that's not going back in the bottle, the bottle is smashed.
The only reasonable outcome would be section 230 style carveouts so that there is zero liability for anything a model does.
Because having guardrails on corporate models barely months ahead of open ones, which will never be restricted, is entirely pointless.
>child pornographer(grok)
People call grok that because deviants were abusing grok's ability to edit images and post them publicly on X to strip people - including children - of their clothes, from their public photos. Then when there was backlash, Elon laughed it off. It took half the world opening investigations against X for violations of existing regulations for action to be taken.
The leniency that internet companies get in terms of dealing with illegal content comes with the expectation that they're making reasonable efforts to control the distribution of said content. X, and Grok, were actively supporting the production and distribution of the content in public.
It is very different from someone creating such images in a private account, and definitely very different from someone using a local model to do it.
My entire post was how it is unreasonable to have a dual standard, and my point was it's really irrelevant if it's a model you download and use locally, or if it's a model hosted remotely, or hosted and created remotely. You're not really providing any sensible reason where the line is, except "public company", which is, again, the entire point I'm making.
The only realistic, non-double standard is that the creator of the model should be 100% responsible. What on earth does it have to do with who's hosting it?
And by this metric, aren't all the uncensored models on huggingface, child pornographers? And if so, why not? Provide tangible, real, sensible reasons please, and after all, isn't hugging face a company?
You know, people are all over the place on this. I see people complaining about guardrails, then in the next breath complaining there aren't enough. Complaining that open models are the thing, but then creating double standards.
So once again, what is your actual reason why it's different?
It isn't about "public company", the line is "posted to a public social media platform, with the owner indicating amusement".
If someone uses something one of OpenAI's hosted models to generate illegal content, it isn't automatically spread to anyone that clicks on the post the original image is from. On top of that, OpenAI does not explicitly endorse the use of their models for such activities the way Musk did.
If someone uses a local model to generate illegal content, same thing applies.
I have a hard time believing that you're arguing in good faith. The differences are so blatantly obvious and they don't even require any discussion about guardrails. Grok was being used to edit images and post them on public social media. The technology to edit images has existed for decades now. So here's a direct analogy via Photoshop:
1. In the case of a local model: Someone using a local image editor to edit photos into illicit material and manually distributing them.
2. In the case of a hosted model: Someone using a cloud image editor to edit photos into illicit material and manually distributing them.
3. In the case of Grok: Someone using a cloud image editor to edit photos into illicit material, the cloud image editor automatically distributing it to the public, and the owner of the editor endorsing the material as an exemplar of what their editor is capable of.
In 1 and 2, the editor (ie the AI) was just a neutral tool. In 3 the issue is that the company explicitly endorsed and distributed the material, no longer neutral. This is why it's reputation is of being a CP machine.
2 replies →
The "child pornography" thing was about image generation, which people for better or worse have very different moral standards for than for text generation. There is very little pushback against grok being willing to write explicit descriptions of sex, or giving security advise.
Though I think your overall point still stands, and at least Grok's twitter bot has received a lot of criticism for pure text too (Mecha hitler comes to mind)
It also must be seen in the context that the open weight models aren't commercially associated with a popular distribution site where people share the images, the people behind them aren't public figures seen as encouraging the use of the model for "undressing" (albeit in a funny way not related to minors), and they haven't yet responded to questions about what can be produced using their tool by proposing guardrails but only for non-paying users...
Open weight models get scrutinised in a different way, also linked to perceptions of their developers' bias, like the tests to see whether they refuse to answer questions on certain historical events at Tiananmen Square
> There is very little pushback against grok being willing to write explicit descriptions of sex, or giving security advise.
John Oliver disagrees with this
> And over the next few years, everyone and their dog will have local GPU compute to train locally. People have home labs, the bar isn't that high, and eventually large text datasets will escape from Anthropic and other companies, allowing for comparable training.
You're vastly underestimating the scaling problem here.
Things that would need to be true for your statement to be valid:
> child pornographer(grok)
Further reading: XAI Bets on Grok's Racy Side, The Information, Jun 24, 2026
&: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/xai-cant-deny-gr...
Well... They are all part of a "high well regarded" group of people of a security committee that has no specialists or whatsoever, only trillionaires on a round table