I wonder if any of these people are proud of the work they do.

I mean, I'd find it hard to imagine that anyone could possibly be proud of the current state of that website; it's a bit of a shambles.

> I imagine many of their privately held beliefs are just as horrible but they’re not dumb enough to say them publicly.

Why would you support a company run by someone stupid enough to say their polarising beliefs publicly? It doesn't inspire confidence in their judgment. Even if you personally agree with their polarising beliefs, you have to question their decision making process in why they chose to deliberately make them public, damaging the company. If they're stupid like that, maybe they've made stupid decisions with their products (which in Elon's case, yes, he has, and not just at Tesla).

It makes sexual images of real people without their consent. That's what's breaking the law.

Is an image of someone wearing only a bikini seriously claimed to be sexual here?

Not by this article, for sure.

"The service prohibits pornography involving real people’s likenesses and sexual content involving minors, which is illegal to create or distribute.

Still, users have prompted Grok to digitally remove clothing from photos — mostly of women — so the subjects appeared to be wearing only underwear or bikinis."

Try doing that to your coworker and report back on how HR describes it in your offboarding meeting.

The question is about an image not an action.

Removing people's clothes without their consent is assault, it doesn't matter if, in another setting, where they did consent to it, it would be fine. It obviously is sexual if you look at the intent of people doing it. Not the clothing itself.

> Removing people's clothes without their consent is assault

Didn't you know? Grok does not actually remove people's clothes. Instead it pastes from photos of /other people who are already naked/.

It makes it look realistic with their likeness and body shape though, so it's not merely "pasting" from photos of other people. And quite honestly I find it morally objectionable to have a tool that makes violating consent and bodily autonomy so trivial. Filters exist, they should be used. It's nothing like photoshop. It runs on their servers, using their software, and then is uploaded, by them, onto their website. Yeah I definitely hold X and grok accountable for the harm it causes. It's nothing like offline software.

It's nonconsensual generation of sexual content of real people that is breaking the law. And things like CSAM generation which is obviously illegal.

> It feels a bit like foreign morals are being forced upon us.

Welcome to the rest of the world, where US morals have been forced upon us for decades. You should probably get used to it.

When you start a subscription, you're agreeing to pay X amount every Y period of time; you're not starting a new agreement every single Y period of time.

They can cancel the prior tier or bump up the price on renewal though. This is the problem with subscriptions, you become complacent and accept incremental changes until you finally notice that you’re being rinsed.

And actually some subscriptions can include unilateral price increases in the contract (a subscription is a contract) with early termination fees. It just isn’t commonly done because word gets around and you will lose business. You typically only see this in predatory industries where there are few alternatives and the service is necessary, like local waste management.

If the contract is unfair enough you can usually escape it in court or arbitration, but nobody wants to go through that.

No, that doesn't make sense at all. You've paid for consistent terms for that Y period of time. Not cancelling the subscription when it's up for renewal is an implicit agreement to any new terms. And I'm sure if you'd read those terms in the first place, you'd come to the same understanding.

(And it's not even that: the X you're charged is subject to change upon renewal!)

I'm not arguing that this is a good or bad thing, just pointing out the reality of every single subscription agreement I've signed up for online.

Of course you are. Either party can adjust a contract on renewal, just like a lease.

Also you aren't agreeing to pay to renew the contract. It isn't a rent payment in a structured contract. You can cancel at any time.

I'm sure people who can afford to run virtual desktops in the cloud can also afford a phone/laptop/desktop to access sites that block those virtual desktops in the cloud.

I'm thinking more along the lines of people using virtual desktops assigned by their job, and those sites are part of their work. I don't feel like punting to BYOD is a good solution.

I think, for many, the web should be free for humans.

When scraping was mainly used to build things like search indexes which are ultimately mutually beneficial to both the website owner and the search engine, and the scrapers were not abusive, nobody really had a problem.

But for generative AI training and access, with scrapers that DDoS everything in sight, and which ultimately cause visits to the websites to fall significantly and merely return a mangled copy of its content back to the user, scraping is a bad thing. It also doesn't help that the generative AI companies haven't paid most people for their training data.

> Hulu and Disney Plus have taken centuries in this endeavor.

Only in the US. Everywhere else Hulu has always been integrated into Disney+).

This is where a quick "kindly fuck off" response would save a lot of time for everyone involved.

Better if nobody buys it.