The article link appropriately disqualifies itself of not being partisan by the fact of the article explicitly having links to share it on multiple semi-dead platforms but not X. X, which they left with arguments about "reach" which don't pass half a smell test.
Hope EFF digs itself out of the mud it finds itself in today in the future.
> The article link appropriately disqualifies itself of not being partisan
Where does EFF call itself non-partisan, and how is that relevant to Twitter's/X's violations of privacy? Definitions of partisan include [1]:
> An adherent to a party or faction.
> A fervent, sometimes militant, supporter or proponent of a party, cause, faction, person, or idea.
By the second definition and arguably by the first as well, EFF is fundamentally a partisan organization [2]:
> The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF champions user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development. EFF's mission is to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world.
"Reach" was only ever one reason EFF stopped posting on X. Among yet other reasons, EFF had partisan reasons for leaving X [3]:
> Twitter was never a utopia. We've criticized the platform for about as long as it’s been around. Still, Twitter did deserve recognition from time to time for vociferously fighting for its users’ rights. That changed. Musk fired the entire human rights team and laid off staffers in countries where the company previously fought off censorship demands from repressive regimes.
Lots of words to say nothing. Obviously the original mission statement of EFF has been bipartisan, turning against Musk and by that turning a lot more anti-freedom of speech and anti-liberty has soiled their image.
Them continuing on such extremely partisan platforms like Truth Social for the left (BlueSky) just makes them unsupportable. Which is something I'd thought I'd never say, but that's the world we live in. Where champions of justice get attacked, and censorious hate mills get even officially boosted.
Just read your own arguments. X bad because it fires a team they'd never needed to have as a social media company just to stay afloat, especially as it was proven that those firings were tacitly necessary for the platform to survive?
>"previously" fought off censorship demands
This just proves you're either uninformed or lying on purpose. The furor with which Musk pushed Brazil and De Moraes to not censor people on X was awe-inspiring. Something the old Twitter never managed to do in such scale.
> Them continuing on such extremely partisan platforms like Truth Social for the left (BlueSky)
Especially but not exclusively due to the fact that whatever "censorship" Bluesky imposes can be avoided with different clients in most cases and different PDSs in worst cases, I'm not going to pretend that Bluesky and Truth Social are anywhere near the same in terms of speech diversity [1] (aside: nor will I pretend that X has more speech diversity than Bluesky). (In the context of this post and thread, I use "censorship" to mean a company's own moderation and censorship to mean speech restrictions backed by government coercion/threats.)
> X bad because it fires a team they'd never needed to have as a social media company just to stay afloat, especially as it was proven that those firings were tacitly necessary for the platform to survive?
By "proven" "tacitly necessary", I assume you mean proven in hindsight, to which I disagree. You're arguing that after Musk bought the company it had to fire its anti-censorship team [2] to "fix" its money situation ($13 billion debt that banks ended up reselling instead of collecting from Twitter/Musk), even though before Musk bought the company it could have continued on with its anti-censorship team for years without losing $13 billion. You're also arguing that post-buyout Twitter is better because sometimes getting revenue may matter more than fighting censorship (which I don't necessarily disagree with), while pre-buyout Twitter was foolish for more heavily prioritizing fighting censorship over getting revenue. (Aside: Musk launched a frivolous lawsuit against advertisers that was bad for both getting revenue and fighting censorship [3].)
> The furor with which Musk pushed Brazil and De Moraes to not censor people on X was awe-inspiring. Something the old Twitter never managed to do in such scale.
Holding the record for most government censorship demands resisted in one incident, does not make up for overall acquiescing more often to censorship demands [4] or for reducing the company's ability to resist censorship demands [2].
> Grok AI generated large amounts of CSAM and nonconsensual intimate imagery
Grok Imagine has been considerably locked down in terms of intimate imagery over the last few weeks. E.g. Harley Quinn used to be one of the easiest characters to manipulate, with or without any resemblance to Margot Robbie. No more. X still serves up explicit hardcore, and Imagine used to get at least in that neighborhood, but that has been squelched. For prurient purposes, nerfed. Not at all limited to CSAM or real people. The pressure they're getting from all over seems to explain it.
I think the terminology here can confuse the issue a bit. And because its such a socially pernicious and stigmatized topic, it's hard to even talk about the phrasing without without raising doubts as to why you would get caught up in the weeds on such an issue. But, I would say there is use in making the distinction between something that is CSAM, where its a record of abuse that has happened to a real child, and sexualized depictions of children, or content promoting the sexualization of children. The social and personal harms are distinct, and if we are to firmly understand the arguments for/against guardrails on generative AI, then it's a distinction that needs to be made I think.
A problem you'd probably run into here is that it would be rather difficult to prove that no real CSAM was involved in the process of making the somehow-okay fake CSAM. Image generation models require training sets, after all. Do the companies training these models have the necessary data and evidence to prove every individual in every training image was over 18? Is generating fake CSAM okay if you trained the model on non-CSAM photos of real kids? I don't think so.
There are of course situations where being aggressive about this can hinder people's freedoms - like an adult who looks 'too young' having their freedoms curtailed because any photos or videos would Look Like CSAM - but I don't think they're common enough harms to justify holding back on regulation here.
> like an adult who looks 'too young' having their freedoms curtailed because any photos or videos would Look Like CSAM - but I don't think they're common enough harms
It is extremely common in some parts of the world. Age from visual appearance basically doesn't work inter-culturally, with or without AI, and ... there are people amassing something like 1/3 of the world that look like kids until they must retire from all work including use of gas stoves to boil water. Said people just literally look like kids, attracts wrong kinds of the rest 2/3, wrongly reject them if others come over, and gets banned on social media as being underaged, all the time.
edit: I have feeling that the concept of "adults by appearance" might be the case of suspicious discontinuities created by industrial revolution; it is often said that the modern concept of binary child/adults dichotomy is the result of industrialization though the concept of child always existed. For this reason, there might have been selective pressure towards attaining "definitely adult" appearances at younger ages in forerunner regions, and less such pressure at regions that followed it. IMO that makes more sense than assuming people from some regions are obsessed with certain things.
Actual porn sites have to have written records proving their models are over 18. If Grok wakes to generate porn, they can go ahead and prove that the models in their training images were of age, regardless of how they look. Nobody is suggesting to trust the AI (or anyone else) to determine the age of a person based solely on appearance.
Unless of course you're trying to argue that sexualized images of children generated by grok can't be proven to be images of children, because that's ridiculous.
We used to have "coming of age" ceremonies that were more based around the individual person in question than a simple age number. But that would be too hard for a law to make a rule on.
>there are people amassing something like 1/3 of the world that look like kids until they must retire from all work including use of gas stoves to boil water.
Personally I think that even if the training data, is made of images of people who are over 18, the state of the adult industry is that there is a lot of harm and exploitation involved in that even. Do we have the evidence necessary to prove every over 18 person who's images are in the training data are okay with that use? So there is no somehow-okay anything. But if were dealing with models that can combine concepts .. then "adult" + "sex" = "sexualized adult" so "child" + "sex" = "sexualized child" .. this is just a fundamental capability of the technology. Without even getting into nudity where its easy to see how non CSAM, non-sexualize medical images etc, can fill in the gaps for the model.
This is why I think just calling it CSAM is confusing the arguments. I see the base harm as being the promotion of sexualization of children. And this is more a harm and risk to society and to people consuming these images. Of course if you extend this to "real childs image" + "sex" to get a sexualized deepfake then there is a kind of harm to that individual too, but its still a disctint thing from physical abuse..
This is just my instincts on this but I'd be really interested to see some real discussion between people with actual extensive understand and experience of all these areas.
Frankly, I don't think anyone cares that these images are generated using CSAM or non-consensual imagery. If I generate a perfectly ordinary picture of a person and the model somehow used CSAM or non-consensual imagery to do it, no one would care. Conversely, if we could prove a model generated gross ass images using nothing gross ass, everyone currently objecting would still object. So, let's just say what we mean here: we have a moral problem with people generating, storing, and sharing these images.
> If someone generates a naked photo of you, even if it looks identical to a real photo, it's not your private data.
"You see, your honor, it's not a picture of them, it's a picture of their reflection in the mirror."
I feel like this discussion is a question of what the exact structure of the hydrogen-filled blimp should look like, and not a discussion of the fact that THE BLIMP IS FILLED WITH HYDROGEN.
Like we got so deep into the lawyered-definition of words, that we skipped right over the clearly wrong/awful intent.
What do you think my comment was responding to? Literally those are the words that I was responding to.
Saying that the provenance of a naked image of myself is relevant to the fact that it's a naked image of _me_ and I don't have ownership over my own image is exactly the kind of lawyer-brained wording I was referring to when I made the comment about the mirror. "It's not a picture of you, it's a picture of a reflection of you."
Your misunderstanding of "private data". This is not lawyered words.
> Saying that the provenance of a naked image of myself
It is not a naked image of yourself.
An image of someone else's naked body does not become a reflection of an image of you just because your face is pasted on it. Object if you wish, but when it comes to privacy, the only possible breach is of the privacy of the body, not the face.
> is relevant to the fact that it's a naked image of _me_ and I don't have ownership over my own image
If I show you a picture of yourself that is a perfect likeness of yourself, And do not tell you how it was collected/created.
Is that an image of you?
It looks exactly like you, and you have found yourself in a similar or same situation at some point (what do you know your memory is human).
You're saying you can't say one way or another whether or not that is a picture of you without knowing where it came from, but I'm saying it doesn't matter where it came from, it is your exact likeness, it is a picture of you.
yeah, I mean, if you don't engage with the comment, then you're not going to understand. So maybe you should take your own advice and actually read what I wrote.
In an ideal world, generated non-consensual imagery should be illegal through invasion of privacy through misappropriation of name or likeness, but I think only a limited number of states have those laws.
In an ideal world, defamation should not be illegal through invasion of specifically privacy. Because that shields perpetrators from clean-room defamations, which is wrong.
I guess I live in such an ideal world? Defamation don't require proofs of breach of privacy where I am, only damages. I've heard that this setup is not universal.
Is it private data if it was scraped from my social media profile marked private but leaked through a shared party? My expectation was that image would only be shared with those I wanted to see it (form of privacy).
Is there any indication it doesn’t. From what you know about LLM teams, products, and engineers, especially XAI, does the word “private” or “Disallow: <my-private-profile-path>” seem to stop them?
"CSAM" is a codeword for anime. Users of this term routinely reject focusing on real kids and abuses. I assume "privacy" must be therefore a codeword too, especially considering that nonconsensual shocking images can be handled by defamation laws than privacy laws and principles.
I would hope we can agree that aggressive policing of anime and cartoons is a bad thing without denying the real existence of CSAM - the actual thing - or denying the bad things that have to occur for it to exist
I never denied the real existence of CSAM, I'm just saying that there are people who use "CSAM" to specifically mean anime and anime related photos and avoids discussion of actually detecting or preventing sexual abuses. I think I've seen it blatantly said on organizational blog posts somewhere that trying to move focus to kids is disingenuous or something.
Just so were clear here the CSAM acronym stands for Child Sexual Abuse Material. Some Anime gets caught up because there is a lot of dubious visual depictions of that.
Which is a moral affront, not an offense against a person. The whole reason CSAM is abhorrent is its evidence of abuse. A cartoon is evidence of nothing. We should treat them differently.
> The whole reason CSAM is abhorrent is its evidence of abuse
This would make cartel execution videos more abhorrent?
Why would watching or possession of evidence of abuse against a person be an offense against a person? Other than potential second-order effects that may or may not occur like increase in demand for abuse?
I think it's perceived as abhorrent mostly because it's an evidence of the person watching being sexually interested in kids.
> This would make cartel execution videos more abhorrent?
I don't really wanna get into a hierarchy of abuse/violence; let's just say they're both bad. But watching a video of a beheading isn't beheading someone. We may have a moral objection to someone deriving pleasure from the watching of it, and we may even worry that without regulation we'd create a market for this abhorrent act, but it's still not the same thing.
> Why would watching or possession of evidence of abuse against a person be an offense against a person?
I didn't say this. I said CSAM is evidence of abuse against a person in a way anime can't be.
> I think it's perceived as abhorrent mostly because it's an evidence of the person watching being sexually interested in kids.
Yup, it's moral outrage. I'm not saying that's good or bad--personally I think there isn't enough moral outrage these day. All I'm arguing is the way we treat people who have CSAM is pretty unhinged, and it's even more absurd when we talk about AI-generated CSAM and like, loli hentai or whatever.
Now I understand, yeah, it would make sense to use the CSAM acronym only for material presenting sexual abuse of actual children.
I'd say loli hentai is actually more distilled, visually appealing, action packed and addictive version of child porn, and long term it affects consumer's perception of real-life children in a deeply satanic way, and as such deserves more stigma than it gets.
To be clear, I'm not advocating for loli hentai or CSAM. I'm closer to the ban Internet porn side of things. But it's not because I think it turns you into a degenerate (I'm on a big "please interact directly with more humans" kick lately). While it's true if you're sexually inexperienced you get a weird idea of sex from porn, it's not as though you watch a lot of, say, stepsister porn and dot dot dot, a few months later you're propositioning your own sister. These are the same wrong arguments people made about video games, horror movies, whatever. It's moral panic, pure and simple. And anyone who doesn't think that should explain why it's illegal to have CSAM but not snuff, why it's illegal to generate CSAM but not pictures of people being murdered, etc.
The original issue was specifically to do with bikini photos - parents often upload pictures of children in bathing suits without this being considered CSAM content, so Grok (and all other AI models) weren't moderating this. Here's the original article from Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/grok-says-safeguard...
But they did resist locking it down, recall Musk making fun of concerns? They clearly don't take governance seriously, its whatever Musk is gravitating to in his filter bubble.
> Previously, users could ask Grok to edit images and put people into revealing clothing like bikinis.
It's because bikini photos aren't generally considered CSAM, or weren't until this year. NPR states "Musk mocks critics" but there is no evidence of him mocking CSAM concerns, and the second two documents don't mention Musk making fun of concerns at all.
No, the opposite. I’m being acute. You are vaguely (I suspect deliberately vaguely) referring to “CSAM generation“, I’m pointing out the specific issue of generating images of children wearing bathing suits (children wearing bathing suits has historically not been considered CSAM) and giving references to prove it.
Look. OP said he couldn’t remember something so I provided some links to jog his memory. There is no shortage of examples of musk being a shithead for anyone who cares.
I am not going to litigate every detail in these articles because that’s not the point of this thread but for SOME REASON you feel obligated to jump to an oligarch’s defense and I am not going to waste any more time on you.
I mean really, what can I say to someone who is drawing lines around content of children in bikinis as some kind of defense. So weird and gross.
I provided specifics and you said I was being obtuse.
> There is no shortage of examples of musk being a shithead
People doing things you personally don’t agree with doesn’t make them evil.
> I am not going to litigate every detail in these articles because that’s not the point of this thread
You were caught lying about a serious matter of course you feel bad. You made an accusation of someone distributing CSAM but they provably did no such thing, and worst of all you did that because you disagree with their politics.
> I am not going to waste any more time on you.
Yes because you’re ashamed and want to cower. It’s not nice to lose in public.
> So weird and gross.
Rather than call other people weird and gross when you’re exposed like this why don’t you seriously consider how you’re spending your life?
I’d write a more detailed response about exactly what I think of your character but Dan is going to show up and I’d like to follow the rules.
Do you mean that Musk not making fun of concerns is easily falsifiable, or Musk making fun of concerns is easily falsifiable? Nobody in this thread has been able to provide evidence that Musk mocked CSAM concerns.
Reddit did the same. Tumblr died when it banned porn. There seems to be a very perverse incentive for social media platforms to be as permissive as possible.
Personally, I'd be in favor of banning all sexual content on X, but it really feels like a legislative solution applying to all social media platforms might be the best solution.
And yes I realize the slippery slope that could put us on.
The issue wasn't specifically allowing NSFW content, it was allowing anyone to get grok to openly make NSFW deepfakes of anyone without even an attempt at policing things.
your iPhone can be used to film non-imaginary CSAM and securely distribute it with Signal over the Internet. think of the children and throw it into a blender.
My phone won't be used for that for as long as it belongs to me. If someone else does that with their phone, they should go to jail. If Elon published that data, he should too
There was a small number of crazy anime nerds rotating accounts tokenmaxxing Grok image generation to generate anime and cosplayer porn shorts with egregiously low yields and no intention of even publishing the results let alone monetizing, something like <1 result per daily quota across few accounts. Grok was briefly focused on adult usage, and they took advantage of that, until it was too much for even xAI. It seems British online advocacy groups tend to use "CSAM" as circumlocution for "anime", perhaps inspired by the fact that both imagined and real figures seen in anime related content always look to be below legal ages to some to the point that said some thinks it can be banned as willfully depicting underaged entities, so maybe this is a push coming from that direction.
I don't necessarily find people generating porn shorts with AI literally wrong(I'm not compatible with AI generated images), but I can see why it can be a problem if the cohort that specifically seek anime style photorealistic videos were absolutely pinning the system at capacity while the rest of the users remained disinterested in it.
I actually have the same opinion about hand drawn arts on social media, it completely exhausts all available resources and simply wins the attention economy, and it _can_ be "problematic" that it does, in some contexts, not necessarily that it concerns me personally. I guess it's always had been that way considering that they used ground up gemstones given by monarchs in medieval biblical life sized nude paintings, just turned up to 1000.
Our response[^1] to X’s petition debunks many claims the company uses in its arguments. For example, there’s little evidence the order placed an undue financial burden on X. In our letter, we note that the compliance cost is merely “a rounding error against the $200 billion valuation of X Corp. following the xAI merger.”
The letter is more interesting than the cover, undersigned by Center for Digital Democracy, Check My Ads Institute, Constitutional Alliance, Consumer Action, Consumer Federation of America, Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety, Demand Progress Education Fund (“DPEF”), Electronic Frontier Foundation (“EFF”), Electronic Privacy Information Center (“EPIC”), National Consumers League (“NCL”), Oregon Consumer Justice, Oregon Consumer League, Public Citizen, Travelers United and Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, and drafted by DPEF's Special Advisor Kate Oh (kate@demandprogress.org),
EFF's Senior Staff Technologist William Budington (bill@eff.org), EPIC's Senior Counsel Sara Geoghegan (geoghegan@epic.org), and NCL's Senior Public Policy Manager Eden Iscil (edeni@nclnet.org).
The EFF does not blindly take the stance that "anything should be allowed as long as you do it with a computer". Their input here is very reasonable, and in standing with their principles.
The novel thing for EFF here, as I see it, isn't the idea that some uses of computers are illegal. Rather, it's the suggestion that tech companies have a duty to police or restrict users' use of their technology.
When I worked at EFF we argued in about 20 different contexts that tech companies are not responsible for user activity even if they know that some of it is unlawful in some way, and that tech companies do not have a duty to restrict users in order to deter some kind of unlawful behavior.
We said that about copyright infringement (again and again and again, including before the Supreme Court in MGM v. Grokster), about counterfeiting, about housing discrimination, about distribution of existing child porn, about manufacture of weapons, about evading law enforcement surveillance, and about every kind of tort in content moderation (the intermediaries do not have a duty to prevent people from publishing content that civilly harms others). Oh, also money laundering with cryptocurrency mixer code. And prostitution.
In every case EFF's position was that there might be unlawful ways to use technology but the technology developer or operator didn't have a duty to prevent or discourage it, or to design the technology to prevent or discourage it, or to help the government or private parties catch people doing something unlawful.
I know there are several different legal doctrines in play there and some of them may have limitations in terms of actual knowledge (although EFF usually also argued for defining this narrowly!), so maybe one could argue that if Grok obtains actual knowledge of some improper use that it might have a duty to prevent that use in that case. But it would have been historically exceptional for EFF to say that there was a general duty to design technology to deter or detect any form of unlawful use.
There may also be a distinction in several of the relevant legal doctrines between inventing a technology (or making it available to others to use themselves on their own devices) versus hosting it on a cloud service, where the operator has more knowledge and more control than in other settings. EFF still historically preferred in basically every case to try to minimize the technology creator's or operator's liability for what users did.
How is EFF asking to police or restrict users use of technology? The only thing they seem to be asking here is for X to continue to generate reports in how they use (or misuse) PII.
The concerns on Grok seem pretty specific: to not take for granted that it doesn’t introduce problems with how Twitter handles user data, not what users can do with it.
From the article:
“These sweeping assurances that corporate restructuring led to a fundamental change in X’s policy and practices around user data should be met with a healthy dose of skepticism, given evidence to the contrary. For example, the company’s quiet rollout integrated its AI model Grok with the platform in 2024, trained (without meaningful consent) on X user data. The company was also subject to a massive data breach in 2025.”
Nothing about groks capabilities or what users are allowed to ask it.
There is some clear disapproval of Grok's capabilities in the end of the second section:
> X Corp.’s flagship product since its identity change—a generative AI
model called Grok—has created shocking amounts of child sexual abuse material (“CSAM”) and other nonconsensual sexual imagery. X Corp.’s generation of CSAM and other nonconsensual imagery was so egregious that it sparked several investigations and lawsuits, including by a bipartisan coalition of 35 state attorneys general and international law enforcement.
I guess it is complicated by the context that the letter goes on to claim that these capabilities were partly enabled by misuse of personal data (the underlying issue before the FTC here), which leaves open some possibility that EFF would agree that X should not be liable for users' use of Grok if it had been created by some other means.
I think there's a fundamental difference between a hosting service being liable for user content and an image generation service being responsible for the images they generate.
Those cases are going to implicate significantly different legal doctrines (e.g. the former might be covered by the CDA immunity and the latter is probably not), but I imagine EFF would historically have preferred to protect the services from liability in both cases. I can't prove this conclusively because the issue didn't come up in a similar form while I worked there.
If it was about capabilities of downloaded software, I don't think it would even be a close question. For cloud services I can see that it can get more complicated, because the service operator would be straightforwardly able to choose to have more knowledge or choose to exercise more control. (But in other cases where the services had a somewhat more passive role, EFF regularly argued that companies shouldn't have to proactively monitor how people used them, even if they could.)
EFF has, on multiple occasions, specifically defended Kiwifarms, a site which unabashedly exists to turn people into hate-celebrities, with some members having kept "kill counts" of harrassed targets who committed suicide. The site is also known for spreading absurd false accusations, which has at least as much negative impact as AI revenge porn.
The EFF is not consistent in its principles. It has partisan bias. However, it can still be worth situationally supporting for certain causes.
When they oppose AB1043 (California parental controls act) it seems like they are taking that stance, that the government must not regulate computers because they are computers. What's different about the Grok situation?
Are you claiming that privacy can never be a prerequisite for freedom and/or justice?
It's trivially easy to see cases where freedom+justice+innovation can conflict with each other (it's even trivially easy to see where they can conflict with each other specifically for innovations involving the reduction of privacy, ye olde panopticon.)
So it's also trivially simple to understand that at some point you're gonna have to pick one over another. And note that freedom is the first word in that list.
> The EFF's mission statement supports them prioritizing freedom and innovation over privacy.
What about the sentence right before the mission statement? [1]
> The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF champions user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development. EFF's mission is to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world.
> The EFF's mission statement supports them prioritizing freedom and innovation over privacy.
For as long as I've known about EFF (which is less than a decade, I admit), EFF has never seemed to prioritize "innovation" over privacy. As for freedom, privacy often is a prerequisite.
It gives the ability to speak and communicate without fear of being censored or surveillance (edit to add: and when there is censorship & surveillance it gives helps regain some of said freedom). It supports other freedoms like voting and freedom of association. It reduces the ability of others to harass or threaten or stalk you, making your daily life easier. It allows for whistleblowing against illegal acts of companies or government entities. Journalists and their sources often need it as part of their ability to freely do their jobs.
Not really that important but I think the latter is more commonly referred to as "freedom from" rather than "freedom of"? I'm not 100% sure if I parsed that correctly.
Privacy is a requirement for freedom. You would act differently if everyone/the government knew everything you were thinking/saying/doing. The watchers would also act differently (think about all the accusations of incompetence when people post violent things on Facebook and then go on shooting sprees).
The article link appropriately disqualifies itself of not being partisan by the fact of the article explicitly having links to share it on multiple semi-dead platforms but not X. X, which they left with arguments about "reach" which don't pass half a smell test.
Hope EFF digs itself out of the mud it finds itself in today in the future.
> The article link appropriately disqualifies itself of not being partisan
Where does EFF call itself non-partisan, and how is that relevant to Twitter's/X's violations of privacy? Definitions of partisan include [1]:
> An adherent to a party or faction.
> A fervent, sometimes militant, supporter or proponent of a party, cause, faction, person, or idea.
By the second definition and arguably by the first as well, EFF is fundamentally a partisan organization [2]:
> The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF champions user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development. EFF's mission is to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world.
"Reach" was only ever one reason EFF stopped posting on X. Among yet other reasons, EFF had partisan reasons for leaving X [3]:
> Twitter was never a utopia. We've criticized the platform for about as long as it’s been around. Still, Twitter did deserve recognition from time to time for vociferously fighting for its users’ rights. That changed. Musk fired the entire human rights team and laid off staffers in countries where the company previously fought off censorship demands from repressive regimes.
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/partisan
[2] https://www.eff.org/about
[3] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/eff-leaving-x
Lots of words to say nothing. Obviously the original mission statement of EFF has been bipartisan, turning against Musk and by that turning a lot more anti-freedom of speech and anti-liberty has soiled their image.
Them continuing on such extremely partisan platforms like Truth Social for the left (BlueSky) just makes them unsupportable. Which is something I'd thought I'd never say, but that's the world we live in. Where champions of justice get attacked, and censorious hate mills get even officially boosted.
Just read your own arguments. X bad because it fires a team they'd never needed to have as a social media company just to stay afloat, especially as it was proven that those firings were tacitly necessary for the platform to survive?
>"previously" fought off censorship demands
This just proves you're either uninformed or lying on purpose. The furor with which Musk pushed Brazil and De Moraes to not censor people on X was awe-inspiring. Something the old Twitter never managed to do in such scale.
> Them continuing on such extremely partisan platforms like Truth Social for the left (BlueSky)
Especially but not exclusively due to the fact that whatever "censorship" Bluesky imposes can be avoided with different clients in most cases and different PDSs in worst cases, I'm not going to pretend that Bluesky and Truth Social are anywhere near the same in terms of speech diversity [1] (aside: nor will I pretend that X has more speech diversity than Bluesky). (In the context of this post and thread, I use "censorship" to mean a company's own moderation and censorship to mean speech restrictions backed by government coercion/threats.)
> X bad because it fires a team they'd never needed to have as a social media company just to stay afloat, especially as it was proven that those firings were tacitly necessary for the platform to survive?
By "proven" "tacitly necessary", I assume you mean proven in hindsight, to which I disagree. You're arguing that after Musk bought the company it had to fire its anti-censorship team [2] to "fix" its money situation ($13 billion debt that banks ended up reselling instead of collecting from Twitter/Musk), even though before Musk bought the company it could have continued on with its anti-censorship team for years without losing $13 billion. You're also arguing that post-buyout Twitter is better because sometimes getting revenue may matter more than fighting censorship (which I don't necessarily disagree with), while pre-buyout Twitter was foolish for more heavily prioritizing fighting censorship over getting revenue. (Aside: Musk launched a frivolous lawsuit against advertisers that was bad for both getting revenue and fighting censorship [3].)
> The furor with which Musk pushed Brazil and De Moraes to not censor people on X was awe-inspiring. Something the old Twitter never managed to do in such scale.
Holding the record for most government censorship demands resisted in one incident, does not make up for overall acquiescing more often to censorship demands [4] or for reducing the company's ability to resist censorship demands [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_Social#Censorship_allega...
[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/11/twitters-monetizable-u...
[3] https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/27/turns-out-that-advertise...
[4] https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-or...
> Grok AI generated large amounts of CSAM and nonconsensual intimate imagery
Grok Imagine has been considerably locked down in terms of intimate imagery over the last few weeks. E.g. Harley Quinn used to be one of the easiest characters to manipulate, with or without any resemblance to Margot Robbie. No more. X still serves up explicit hardcore, and Imagine used to get at least in that neighborhood, but that has been squelched. For prurient purposes, nerfed. Not at all limited to CSAM or real people. The pressure they're getting from all over seems to explain it.
Whatever you think about X's image generation models, I don't see how it is related to the petition that the EFF is opposing.
Is generation of non-consensual imagery really a privacy issue?
If someone publishes a real naked photo of you, that was acquired without your consent, that would be a privacy issue.
If someone generates a naked photo of you, even if it looks identical to a real photo, it's not your private data.
I think the terminology here can confuse the issue a bit. And because its such a socially pernicious and stigmatized topic, it's hard to even talk about the phrasing without without raising doubts as to why you would get caught up in the weeds on such an issue. But, I would say there is use in making the distinction between something that is CSAM, where its a record of abuse that has happened to a real child, and sexualized depictions of children, or content promoting the sexualization of children. The social and personal harms are distinct, and if we are to firmly understand the arguments for/against guardrails on generative AI, then it's a distinction that needs to be made I think.
A problem you'd probably run into here is that it would be rather difficult to prove that no real CSAM was involved in the process of making the somehow-okay fake CSAM. Image generation models require training sets, after all. Do the companies training these models have the necessary data and evidence to prove every individual in every training image was over 18? Is generating fake CSAM okay if you trained the model on non-CSAM photos of real kids? I don't think so.
There are of course situations where being aggressive about this can hinder people's freedoms - like an adult who looks 'too young' having their freedoms curtailed because any photos or videos would Look Like CSAM - but I don't think they're common enough harms to justify holding back on regulation here.
> like an adult who looks 'too young' having their freedoms curtailed because any photos or videos would Look Like CSAM - but I don't think they're common enough harms
It is extremely common in some parts of the world. Age from visual appearance basically doesn't work inter-culturally, with or without AI, and ... there are people amassing something like 1/3 of the world that look like kids until they must retire from all work including use of gas stoves to boil water. Said people just literally look like kids, attracts wrong kinds of the rest 2/3, wrongly reject them if others come over, and gets banned on social media as being underaged, all the time.
edit: I have feeling that the concept of "adults by appearance" might be the case of suspicious discontinuities created by industrial revolution; it is often said that the modern concept of binary child/adults dichotomy is the result of industrialization though the concept of child always existed. For this reason, there might have been selective pressure towards attaining "definitely adult" appearances at younger ages in forerunner regions, and less such pressure at regions that followed it. IMO that makes more sense than assuming people from some regions are obsessed with certain things.
Actual porn sites have to have written records proving their models are over 18. If Grok wakes to generate porn, they can go ahead and prove that the models in their training images were of age, regardless of how they look. Nobody is suggesting to trust the AI (or anyone else) to determine the age of a person based solely on appearance.
Unless of course you're trying to argue that sexualized images of children generated by grok can't be proven to be images of children, because that's ridiculous.
We used to have "coming of age" ceremonies that were more based around the individual person in question than a simple age number. But that would be too hard for a law to make a rule on.
>there are people amassing something like 1/3 of the world that look like kids until they must retire from all work including use of gas stoves to boil water.
What are you talking about?
Personally I think that even if the training data, is made of images of people who are over 18, the state of the adult industry is that there is a lot of harm and exploitation involved in that even. Do we have the evidence necessary to prove every over 18 person who's images are in the training data are okay with that use? So there is no somehow-okay anything. But if were dealing with models that can combine concepts .. then "adult" + "sex" = "sexualized adult" so "child" + "sex" = "sexualized child" .. this is just a fundamental capability of the technology. Without even getting into nudity where its easy to see how non CSAM, non-sexualize medical images etc, can fill in the gaps for the model. This is why I think just calling it CSAM is confusing the arguments. I see the base harm as being the promotion of sexualization of children. And this is more a harm and risk to society and to people consuming these images. Of course if you extend this to "real childs image" + "sex" to get a sexualized deepfake then there is a kind of harm to that individual too, but its still a disctint thing from physical abuse.. This is just my instincts on this but I'd be really interested to see some real discussion between people with actual extensive understand and experience of all these areas.
Hand drawings and photoshopping a minor's face onto an adult body are already illegal. Having a machine do the work automatically doesn't change that.
Frankly, I don't think anyone cares that these images are generated using CSAM or non-consensual imagery. If I generate a perfectly ordinary picture of a person and the model somehow used CSAM or non-consensual imagery to do it, no one would care. Conversely, if we could prove a model generated gross ass images using nothing gross ass, everyone currently objecting would still object. So, let's just say what we mean here: we have a moral problem with people generating, storing, and sharing these images.
> If someone generates a naked photo of you, even if it looks identical to a real photo, it's not your private data.
"You see, your honor, it's not a picture of them, it's a picture of their reflection in the mirror."
I feel like this discussion is a question of what the exact structure of the hydrogen-filled blimp should look like, and not a discussion of the fact that THE BLIMP IS FILLED WITH HYDROGEN.
Like we got so deep into the lawyered-definition of words, that we skipped right over the clearly wrong/awful intent.
> Like we got so deep into the lawyered-definition of words,
Perhaps try reading "your private data" again - slowly.
What do you think my comment was responding to? Literally those are the words that I was responding to.
Saying that the provenance of a naked image of myself is relevant to the fact that it's a naked image of _me_ and I don't have ownership over my own image is exactly the kind of lawyer-brained wording I was referring to when I made the comment about the mirror. "It's not a picture of you, it's a picture of a reflection of you."
> What do you think my comment was responding to?
Your misunderstanding of "private data". This is not lawyered words.
> Saying that the provenance of a naked image of myself
It is not a naked image of yourself.
An image of someone else's naked body does not become a reflection of an image of you just because your face is pasted on it. Object if you wish, but when it comes to privacy, the only possible breach is of the privacy of the body, not the face.
> is relevant to the fact that it's a naked image of _me_ and I don't have ownership over my own image
It is not your image.
You do, in fact, have rights over your 'likeness'. In most jurisdictions. [0]
In the US, that would fall under Prosser's Four Torts, "appropriation of name and likeness".
The law, currently, doesn't care if you think its a new image. Likeness is protected. Similarity is enough.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights
Please don't tell me you think you have rights over the image of another's naked body because it looks similar to yours.
Please don't tell me you think my own face is not my own likeness
I won't. I will tell you that any rights over commercial exploitation of a likeness is totally separate from this privacy issue.
Whilst the US has a carveout saying it has to be commercial, Australia, Quebec, and others, do not.
> It is not a naked image of yourself.
If I show you a picture of yourself that is a perfect likeness of yourself, And do not tell you how it was collected/created.
Is that an image of you?
It looks exactly like you, and you have found yourself in a similar or same situation at some point (what do you know your memory is human).
You're saying you can't say one way or another whether or not that is a picture of you without knowing where it came from, but I'm saying it doesn't matter where it came from, it is your exact likeness, it is a picture of you.
A pic of someone else who looks like you is not a pic of you and does not breach your privacy.
yeah, I mean, if you don't engage with the comment, then you're not going to understand. So maybe you should take your own advice and actually read what I wrote.
In an ideal world, generated non-consensual imagery should be illegal through invasion of privacy through misappropriation of name or likeness, but I think only a limited number of states have those laws.
In an ideal world, defamation should not be illegal through invasion of specifically privacy. Because that shields perpetrators from clean-room defamations, which is wrong.
I guess I live in such an ideal world? Defamation don't require proofs of breach of privacy where I am, only damages. I've heard that this setup is not universal.
Should it apply also to drawings? Detailed descriptions? Strong mental visualisations?
Is it private data if it was scraped from my social media profile marked private but leaked through a shared party? My expectation was that image would only be shared with those I wanted to see it (form of privacy).
That's fair. Is there any indication as to if xAi trains on private profiles?
Is there any indication it doesn’t. From what you know about LLM teams, products, and engineers, especially XAI, does the word “private” or “Disallow: <my-private-profile-path>” seem to stop them?
"CSAM" is a codeword for anime. Users of this term routinely reject focusing on real kids and abuses. I assume "privacy" must be therefore a codeword too, especially considering that nonconsensual shocking images can be handled by defamation laws than privacy laws and principles.
I would hope we can agree that aggressive policing of anime and cartoons is a bad thing without denying the real existence of CSAM - the actual thing - or denying the bad things that have to occur for it to exist
I never denied the real existence of CSAM, I'm just saying that there are people who use "CSAM" to specifically mean anime and anime related photos and avoids discussion of actually detecting or preventing sexual abuses. I think I've seen it blatantly said on organizational blog posts somewhere that trying to move focus to kids is disingenuous or something.
Just so were clear here the CSAM acronym stands for Child Sexual Abuse Material. Some Anime gets caught up because there is a lot of dubious visual depictions of that.
Which is a moral affront, not an offense against a person. The whole reason CSAM is abhorrent is its evidence of abuse. A cartoon is evidence of nothing. We should treat them differently.
> The whole reason CSAM is abhorrent is its evidence of abuse
This would make cartel execution videos more abhorrent?
Why would watching or possession of evidence of abuse against a person be an offense against a person? Other than potential second-order effects that may or may not occur like increase in demand for abuse?
I think it's perceived as abhorrent mostly because it's an evidence of the person watching being sexually interested in kids.
> This would make cartel execution videos more abhorrent?
I don't really wanna get into a hierarchy of abuse/violence; let's just say they're both bad. But watching a video of a beheading isn't beheading someone. We may have a moral objection to someone deriving pleasure from the watching of it, and we may even worry that without regulation we'd create a market for this abhorrent act, but it's still not the same thing.
> Why would watching or possession of evidence of abuse against a person be an offense against a person?
I didn't say this. I said CSAM is evidence of abuse against a person in a way anime can't be.
> I think it's perceived as abhorrent mostly because it's an evidence of the person watching being sexually interested in kids.
Yup, it's moral outrage. I'm not saying that's good or bad--personally I think there isn't enough moral outrage these day. All I'm arguing is the way we treat people who have CSAM is pretty unhinged, and it's even more absurd when we talk about AI-generated CSAM and like, loli hentai or whatever.
Now I understand, yeah, it would make sense to use the CSAM acronym only for material presenting sexual abuse of actual children.
I'd say loli hentai is actually more distilled, visually appealing, action packed and addictive version of child porn, and long term it affects consumer's perception of real-life children in a deeply satanic way, and as such deserves more stigma than it gets.
Wow, this virtue signaling thing is easy.
Yeah, exactly.
To be clear, I'm not advocating for loli hentai or CSAM. I'm closer to the ban Internet porn side of things. But it's not because I think it turns you into a degenerate (I'm on a big "please interact directly with more humans" kick lately). While it's true if you're sexually inexperienced you get a weird idea of sex from porn, it's not as though you watch a lot of, say, stepsister porn and dot dot dot, a few months later you're propositioning your own sister. These are the same wrong arguments people made about video games, horror movies, whatever. It's moral panic, pure and simple. And anyone who doesn't think that should explain why it's illegal to have CSAM but not snuff, why it's illegal to generate CSAM but not pictures of people being murdered, etc.
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The original issue was specifically to do with bikini photos - parents often upload pictures of children in bathing suits without this being considered CSAM content, so Grok (and all other AI models) weren't moderating this. Here's the original article from Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/grok-says-safeguard...
But they did resist locking it down, recall Musk making fun of concerns? They clearly don't take governance seriously, its whatever Musk is gravitating to in his filter bubble.
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https://www.npr.org/2026/01/16/nx-s1-5678965/elon-musks-x-to... - after weeks of mocking critics, X’s approach shifted only after investigations mounted
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5689660-xai-investigat... - musk “not aware” of any naked underage images, pushing back on concerns
https://www.humanrightsresearch.org/post/a-new-form-of-gende... - musk downplays concerns and blames users and hackers
From your NPR article:
> Previously, users could ask Grok to edit images and put people into revealing clothing like bikinis.
It's because bikini photos aren't generally considered CSAM, or weren't until this year. NPR states "Musk mocks critics" but there is no evidence of him mocking CSAM concerns, and the second two documents don't mention Musk making fun of concerns at all.
From your second article:
> musk “not aware” of any naked underage images
There aren't any naked underage images. They were bikini photos as linked to from your first article: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/grok-says-safeguard...
You are being intentionally obtuse. Why on earth you would feel the need to play this game when we all know Musk’s character is baffling.
No, the opposite. I’m being acute. You are vaguely (I suspect deliberately vaguely) referring to “CSAM generation“, I’m pointing out the specific issue of generating images of children wearing bathing suits (children wearing bathing suits has historically not been considered CSAM) and giving references to prove it.
“we all know musk’s character” is not an argument, in fact, it’s a textbook example of https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Appeal-.... I could make the same comment about his enemies.
Look. OP said he couldn’t remember something so I provided some links to jog his memory. There is no shortage of examples of musk being a shithead for anyone who cares.
I am not going to litigate every detail in these articles because that’s not the point of this thread but for SOME REASON you feel obligated to jump to an oligarch’s defense and I am not going to waste any more time on you.
I mean really, what can I say to someone who is drawing lines around content of children in bikinis as some kind of defense. So weird and gross.
I provided specifics and you said I was being obtuse.
> There is no shortage of examples of musk being a shithead
People doing things you personally don’t agree with doesn’t make them evil.
> I am not going to litigate every detail in these articles because that’s not the point of this thread
You were caught lying about a serious matter of course you feel bad. You made an accusation of someone distributing CSAM but they provably did no such thing, and worst of all you did that because you disagree with their politics.
> I am not going to waste any more time on you.
Yes because you’re ashamed and want to cower. It’s not nice to lose in public.
> So weird and gross.
Rather than call other people weird and gross when you’re exposed like this why don’t you seriously consider how you’re spending your life?
I’d write a more detailed response about exactly what I think of your character but Dan is going to show up and I’d like to follow the rules.
It's not up to the peanut gallery to disprove easily falsifiable statements from easily found public evidence.
Do you mean that Musk not making fun of concerns is easily falsifiable, or Musk making fun of concerns is easily falsifiable? Nobody in this thread has been able to provide evidence that Musk mocked CSAM concerns.
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Reddit did the same. Tumblr died when it banned porn. There seems to be a very perverse incentive for social media platforms to be as permissive as possible.
Personally, I'd be in favor of banning all sexual content on X, but it really feels like a legislative solution applying to all social media platforms might be the best solution.
And yes I realize the slippery slope that could put us on.
The issue wasn't specifically allowing NSFW content, it was allowing anyone to get grok to openly make NSFW deepfakes of anyone without even an attempt at policing things.
> legislative solution
In what country?
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Yes and we should stop at elsewhere too. " it happened elsewhere n times" is a terrible excuse for inaction.
your iPhone can be used to film non-imaginary CSAM and securely distribute it with Signal over the Internet. think of the children and throw it into a blender.
My phone won't be used for that for as long as it belongs to me. If someone else does that with their phone, they should go to jail. If Elon published that data, he should too
There was a small number of crazy anime nerds rotating accounts tokenmaxxing Grok image generation to generate anime and cosplayer porn shorts with egregiously low yields and no intention of even publishing the results let alone monetizing, something like <1 result per daily quota across few accounts. Grok was briefly focused on adult usage, and they took advantage of that, until it was too much for even xAI. It seems British online advocacy groups tend to use "CSAM" as circumlocution for "anime", perhaps inspired by the fact that both imagined and real figures seen in anime related content always look to be below legal ages to some to the point that said some thinks it can be banned as willfully depicting underaged entities, so maybe this is a push coming from that direction.
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I don't necessarily find people generating porn shorts with AI literally wrong(I'm not compatible with AI generated images), but I can see why it can be a problem if the cohort that specifically seek anime style photorealistic videos were absolutely pinning the system at capacity while the rest of the users remained disinterested in it.
I actually have the same opinion about hand drawn arts on social media, it completely exhausts all available resources and simply wins the attention economy, and it _can_ be "problematic" that it does, in some contexts, not necessarily that it concerns me personally. I guess it's always had been that way considering that they used ground up gemstones given by monarchs in medieval biblical life sized nude paintings, just turned up to 1000.
Politely, what on earth point are you trying to make? Whatever it is it really is not coming across well.
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"We only build and operate the orphan crushing machine, it's people that line up to turn the crank".
There's a lot of machines in the world that can be used to crush orphans, but I'm not aware of any that are designed for that purpose.
your phone, your browser, and the Internet itself are orphan crushing machines too, then.
> Grok AI generated large amounts of CSAM
A myth. CSAM is evidence of real-world abuse. Grok fakes are by definition not that.
Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/eff-and-allies-xs-ftc-...
TY!
The EFF featured update / press release at https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/eff-and-allies-xs-ftc-... links to the letter, with color:
Our response[^1] to X’s petition debunks many claims the company uses in its arguments. For example, there’s little evidence the order placed an undue financial burden on X. In our letter, we note that the compliance cost is merely “a rounding error against the $200 billion valuation of X Corp. following the xAI merger.”
[^1]: public interest advocates opposing x petition 2026: https://www.eff.org/files/2026/07/02/public_interest_advocat...
The letter is more interesting than the cover, undersigned by Center for Digital Democracy, Check My Ads Institute, Constitutional Alliance, Consumer Action, Consumer Federation of America, Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety, Demand Progress Education Fund (“DPEF”), Electronic Frontier Foundation (“EFF”), Electronic Privacy Information Center (“EPIC”), National Consumers League (“NCL”), Oregon Consumer Justice, Oregon Consumer League, Public Citizen, Travelers United and Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, and drafted by DPEF's Special Advisor Kate Oh (kate@demandprogress.org), EFF's Senior Staff Technologist William Budington (bill@eff.org), EPIC's Senior Counsel Sara Geoghegan (geoghegan@epic.org), and NCL's Senior Public Policy Manager Eden Iscil (edeni@nclnet.org).
Can update the link to the blog post; no need for this to be an arstechnica PDF
It didn't let me edit, I tried.
Done now! (Submitted URL was https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/EFF-l....)
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Why is the EFF arguing for less freedom on how computers can be used? The EFF should be against the government restricting computing freedom.
The EFF does not blindly take the stance that "anything should be allowed as long as you do it with a computer". Their input here is very reasonable, and in standing with their principles.
The novel thing for EFF here, as I see it, isn't the idea that some uses of computers are illegal. Rather, it's the suggestion that tech companies have a duty to police or restrict users' use of their technology.
When I worked at EFF we argued in about 20 different contexts that tech companies are not responsible for user activity even if they know that some of it is unlawful in some way, and that tech companies do not have a duty to restrict users in order to deter some kind of unlawful behavior.
We said that about copyright infringement (again and again and again, including before the Supreme Court in MGM v. Grokster), about counterfeiting, about housing discrimination, about distribution of existing child porn, about manufacture of weapons, about evading law enforcement surveillance, and about every kind of tort in content moderation (the intermediaries do not have a duty to prevent people from publishing content that civilly harms others). Oh, also money laundering with cryptocurrency mixer code. And prostitution.
In every case EFF's position was that there might be unlawful ways to use technology but the technology developer or operator didn't have a duty to prevent or discourage it, or to design the technology to prevent or discourage it, or to help the government or private parties catch people doing something unlawful.
I know there are several different legal doctrines in play there and some of them may have limitations in terms of actual knowledge (although EFF usually also argued for defining this narrowly!), so maybe one could argue that if Grok obtains actual knowledge of some improper use that it might have a duty to prevent that use in that case. But it would have been historically exceptional for EFF to say that there was a general duty to design technology to deter or detect any form of unlawful use.
There may also be a distinction in several of the relevant legal doctrines between inventing a technology (or making it available to others to use themselves on their own devices) versus hosting it on a cloud service, where the operator has more knowledge and more control than in other settings. EFF still historically preferred in basically every case to try to minimize the technology creator's or operator's liability for what users did.
How is EFF asking to police or restrict users use of technology? The only thing they seem to be asking here is for X to continue to generate reports in how they use (or misuse) PII.
The concerns on Grok seem pretty specific: to not take for granted that it doesn’t introduce problems with how Twitter handles user data, not what users can do with it.
From the article:
“These sweeping assurances that corporate restructuring led to a fundamental change in X’s policy and practices around user data should be met with a healthy dose of skepticism, given evidence to the contrary. For example, the company’s quiet rollout integrated its AI model Grok with the platform in 2024, trained (without meaningful consent) on X user data. The company was also subject to a massive data breach in 2025.”
Nothing about groks capabilities or what users are allowed to ask it.
There is some clear disapproval of Grok's capabilities in the end of the second section:
> X Corp.’s flagship product since its identity change—a generative AI model called Grok—has created shocking amounts of child sexual abuse material (“CSAM”) and other nonconsensual sexual imagery. X Corp.’s generation of CSAM and other nonconsensual imagery was so egregious that it sparked several investigations and lawsuits, including by a bipartisan coalition of 35 state attorneys general and international law enforcement.
I guess it is complicated by the context that the letter goes on to claim that these capabilities were partly enabled by misuse of personal data (the underlying issue before the FTC here), which leaves open some possibility that EFF would agree that X should not be liable for users' use of Grok if it had been created by some other means.
I think there's a fundamental difference between a hosting service being liable for user content and an image generation service being responsible for the images they generate.
Those cases are going to implicate significantly different legal doctrines (e.g. the former might be covered by the CDA immunity and the latter is probably not), but I imagine EFF would historically have preferred to protect the services from liability in both cases. I can't prove this conclusively because the issue didn't come up in a similar form while I worked there.
If it was about capabilities of downloaded software, I don't think it would even be a close question. For cloud services I can see that it can get more complicated, because the service operator would be straightforwardly able to choose to have more knowledge or choose to exercise more control. (But in other cases where the services had a somewhat more passive role, EFF regularly argued that companies shouldn't have to proactively monitor how people used them, even if they could.)
EFF has, on multiple occasions, specifically defended Kiwifarms, a site which unabashedly exists to turn people into hate-celebrities, with some members having kept "kill counts" of harrassed targets who committed suicide. The site is also known for spreading absurd false accusations, which has at least as much negative impact as AI revenge porn.
The EFF is not consistent in its principles. It has partisan bias. However, it can still be worth situationally supporting for certain causes.
When they oppose AB1043 (California parental controls act) it seems like they are taking that stance, that the government must not regulate computers because they are computers. What's different about the Grok situation?
The letter is more about privacy, not freedom.
They're arguing X is a massive privacy risk and should not get any exemptions.
>EFF's mission is to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world.
The EFF's mission statement supports them prioritizing freedom and innovation over privacy.
Are you claiming that privacy can never be a prerequisite for freedom and/or justice?
It's trivially easy to see cases where freedom+justice+innovation can conflict with each other (it's even trivially easy to see where they can conflict with each other specifically for innovations involving the reduction of privacy, ye olde panopticon.)
So it's also trivially simple to understand that at some point you're gonna have to pick one over another. And note that freedom is the first word in that list.
>And note that freedom is the first word in that list.
Which is why I would like the EFF to support freedom.
> The EFF's mission statement supports them prioritizing freedom and innovation over privacy.
What about the sentence right before the mission statement? [1]
> The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF champions user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development. EFF's mission is to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world.
> The EFF's mission statement supports them prioritizing freedom and innovation over privacy.
For as long as I've known about EFF (which is less than a decade, I admit), EFF has never seemed to prioritize "innovation" over privacy. As for freedom, privacy often is a prerequisite.
[1] https://www.eff.org/about
As far as I know, EFF has always championed privacy.
Privacy is a facet of freedom.
It gives the ability to speak and communicate without fear of being censored or surveillance (edit to add: and when there is censorship & surveillance it gives helps regain some of said freedom). It supports other freedoms like voting and freedom of association. It reduces the ability of others to harass or threaten or stalk you, making your daily life easier. It allows for whistleblowing against illegal acts of companies or government entities. Journalists and their sources often need it as part of their ability to freely do their jobs.
Their are two kinds of freedoms, freedom to and freedom from.
And they often contradict.
People should have freedom from abuse of their images, your freedom to abuse them
Edit: fixed "freedom of" to "freedom from", thanks to Alpha3031
Not really that important but I think the latter is more commonly referred to as "freedom from" rather than "freedom of"? I'm not 100% sure if I parsed that correctly.
i don't know how you're equating "computing freedom" with regulation of privacy guards. should FTC not care about that? can you elaborate?
Privacy is a requirement for freedom. You would act differently if everyone/the government knew everything you were thinking/saying/doing. The watchers would also act differently (think about all the accusations of incompetence when people post violent things on Facebook and then go on shooting sprees).
Why is the EFF arguing for less freedom on how computers can be used? The EFF should be against the government restricting computing freedom.
Basic human decency?
So not privacy?
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