Between Grok, Trump, and RFK Jr. it’s a dangerous time to be a child in America

It is a terrible time to be a child in America.

From removing protections from newly resurgent communicable diseases to investing good money after bad into industries that will make the planet more inhospitable during their lifetimes, we adults have wholly abdicated our responsibilities to Gen Alpha (and the infant Gen Beta). We’ve especially failed them by ceding to our own most juvenile inclinations — we elect the irresponsible and reward the feckless — and abandoning them to what we’ve wrought.

You grok? Yeah, that used to mean “to understand profoundly and intuitively” but thanks to the sots that run the social media site X, it now refers to the artificial intelligence assistant that is, as we speak, actively degrading children by allowing users to take any innocently posted photo, and via prompt, have Grok edit and return the same image with the children stripped of their clothing, sometimes with other sexually suggestive details added.

When first called out, the A.I. assistant itself claimed the offending, nonconsensual manipulated images were isolated cases.

But after outcry from ordinary folks and from officials from France, the United Kingdom, India and others globally, Elon Musk — the CEO of X’s holding company, who initially posted laughing emojis about some of the more innocuous manipulated images — has now, according to The Guardian, posted that “anyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.”

Nevertheless, as of yesterday, the degrading images were still being generated and posted, the Guardian noted.

It’s not only children. The majority of the nonconsensual A.I. manipulated images created this way between Dec. 25 and Jan. 1, according to an analysis by a French forensic nonprofit, are of women under the age of 30, with only 2% involving minors under the age of 18. Still, it is particularly troubling that some of the minors subjected to this kind of image editing are allegedly as young as 5 years old.

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The creation of these deepfakes isn’t, unfortunately, limited to X. According to recent article by Wired, Google’s and OpenAI’s chatbots also enable users to manipulate existing images non-consensually this way.

As the adults in the room, our gravest fault in all this isn’t that we’ve given puerile middle-aged tech leaders like Musk the space to ply generative products that retcon our children’s images in gross and nonconsensual ways, though that’s certainly bad enough. No, it’s the cumulative harms to our children we’re enabling across the board and right under our noses.

The generative A.I. that fuels the nonconsensual pornification of our children’s visages for entertainment purposes is part of what empowers Big Tech funding support of the Trump administration. An administration that is working mightily to restrict the image our children themselves can choose to present in the world, and to deny the bodily autonomy of anyone younger than 19.

It’s an administration that has thwarted the release of the Epstein files, despite the calls to do so from the women who were preyed upon and victimized when they were young girls. The same administration that has cut the SNAP benefits that feed millions of young people, and has dismantled educational resources for disabled students. An administration that, under Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s direction, has narrowed access to healthcare, blamed Tylenol for autism, and curtailed gold-standard vaccines for children rather than expanded them.

In the longer term, the same Big Tech responsible for the development of generative A.I. is responsible for the explosion of data centers which we adults welcome because, sure, they create jobs for us now. But since each one consumes up to 5 million gallons of freshwater per day, the world we are shaping for Gen Alpha and Gen Beta children to inhabit will have drastically diminished, or contested, capacity to support human life.

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There are so many other examples of how we, the adults in the room, are choosing to be callow and cavalier about the future. So can we really bristle when we hear members of Gen Alpha (or even Gen Z) say we’ve ruined the world?

If we want the younger generations to be mistaken about that, we must change course now. And the opportunity to flex on the Grok grotesquerie is staring us in the face. Let’s push to close it down altogether until the coding is modified and no one can prompt the A.I. assistant to strip our children of their clothes, their dignity and their agency. We owe them that.

Then we can get started on fixing all the rest.