SpaceX’s IPO this week made founder Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, a sobering milestone highlighting unprecedented levels of inequality and how Wall Street has seemingly forgotten about the very concept of profitability.
To celebrate the occasion, a coalition of family advocates and child development experts called Safe AI Now inflated an enormous effigy of Musk in the middle of New York City’s Times Square on Thursday, an unflattering depiction decorated with a cutting slogan: “Grok makes AI child porn.”
“The goal of this effigy of Musk is to deliver a simple warning to investors: Musk built a dangerous and exploitative AI, covered up the damage, merged it with SpaceX, and is now selling the liability to the public at $135 a share,” the coalition in a statement. “SpaceX shareholders are on the hook for every Grok lawsuit, criminal investigation, and regulatory fine that is coming.”
As Wired points out, the inflatable was placed right in front of the Nasdaq and offices of JP Morgan, which is participating in the SpaceX IPO.
SpaceX warned investors in its S-1 filing ahead of its IPO last month that Grok’s NSFW mode could pose “heightened risks” and “reputational harm” because it can generate “potential nonconsensual or exploitative imagery.”
Videos show the surprisingly well-put-together inflatable in all its flesh-colored glory. Its left shoulder brandishes a tattoo of a heart with the word “ketamine” written over it, alluding to the trillionaire’s well-documented drug habit. Its right shoulder depicts a raised arm in a Nazi salute, a callback to when Musk performed not one but two sieg heils during president Donald Trump’s post-inauguration celebration.
Banners lining the unusual apparition call attention to how Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI, which was recently merged with SpaceX, has enabled the proliferation of child sexual abuse imagery (CSAM.)
“We are extremely concerned about the ease and speed with which people can apparently generate photo-realistic child sexual abuse material (CSAM),” the Internet Watch Foundation wrote in a January statement.
Grok has been extensively used to generate nonconsensual deepfake pornography, including images of minors and politicians, resulting in plenty of legal action, including class action lawsuits and an open letter signed by 35 state attorneys general.
In its S-1 filing, SpaceX admitted it was “subject to investigations and inquiries from regulators and law enforcement authorities in the United States and internationally concerning allegations that our AI products were used to create nonconsensual explicit images or content representing children in sexualized contexts, and similar matters.”
Musk’s AI firm has seemingly done little to address the problem. As Wired reported on Thursday, Grok is still hosting numerous sexualized deepfakes of famous women.
Beyond being accused of enabling the distribution of CSAM, the week of Musk’s becoming a trillionaire was also tarnished by the mercurial entrepreneur stoking racist, anti-immigrant riots in the Northern Irish capital of Belfast.
Musk has a track record of making racist comments on an almost daily basis on his social media platform X — also now owned by SpaceX — and alienating many of his fans.
In short, the unflattering effigy in Times Square is only the very tip of the iceberg. Now that his net worth is several times that of the next richest person in the world, it could soon become even more difficult to hold him to account.
“While this inflatable is a fitting metaphor — much like Musk and his companies, it is inflated, full of hot air, and could pop at any minute — it serves as a warning to investors eager to buy into Musk’s SpaceX IPO on Friday morning,” Safe AI Now wrote in its statement.
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