Deepfakes are really kind of like a wide scale war on women as I've come to see it.

And with looking at how Grok was being weaponized, this is a way for misogynists to be able to control and punish women who they otherwise would not have access to.

Yeah. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Kat Ten Barge. Kat is an independent journalist who writes the Spitfire News newsletter. You were probably just as enraged as I was to see what was going on on Elon Musk's ex-platform over the past month or so, where the safeguards were rolled back on the Grock chatbot to allow it to generate non-consensual,

explicit deepfakes of virtually anybody, men, women, but also even children, and how shockingly bad the response was to what was going on. You know, you essentially have a platform here that was

already turned into this kind of right-wing space because of the way that Elon Musk has

governed it and has changed the way that algorithmic amplification works and, you know, the user base

of the platform overall. But then you have him wanting even more engagement and seeing that

playing into the perverts and the misogynists who are on the platform and who are big fans of his

could use this image generator in ways that are truly shocking and really to get away with it, right?

You know, he received this pressure from various governments who were not happy with what was

happening, but very few of them actually moved forward to practical actions to protect

their citizens who were being victimized in the moment, just continued to allow this to happen

and talked about, you know, maybe having repercussions or doing investigations or that sort of a

thing. It was really terrible to see just how little our government seemed to be able to act against

Elon Musk and this platform he owns, even when it goes so far as not just to create non-consensual

images of women and men of adults, but even of children, which is something that is so clearly

illegal. And so naturally, I felt we had to do an episode on this, and I could think of

no better guest to come on to talk about what happened and the implications of it than Kat.

She has been reporting on deepfakes, on AI-generated explicit images for quite a long time now.

And of course, not only had the kind of background context that was

necessary as this scandal broke out, but was obviously just as enraged about it as all the rest of us.

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