A decade ago, a social media website becoming the world's biggest deepfake website would have triggered a code red incident. It would be incredibly easy to disable Grok, or even just the image editing capabilities. Today? They quite literally laugh about it, and do nothing.
But why would they do anything? As I predicted in Turns out we're the ones going to social media hell, there is no impetus for a site to curtail bad behaviour, even from themselves. Nobody is leaving the site. There have been a litany of reasons, for left and right, to abandon the ship, but the gravitational pull is too strong. In fact, many of the people left on the site have a cult-like devotion to the movement.
Twitter quite literally threw up a "please don't do this" sign, and moved on with their day.
Even today, days after the outrage, going through Grok's posts makes my skin crawl. Women being uploaded to the site by a stranger, and then immediately undressed, with the result being publicly broadcast to the world.
The media cycle moves on. The user base stays. Twitter's advert with Burnley FC is visible in their Premier League match tonight, broadcast across hundreds of channels worldwide.
Even today, John Carmack had the gall to say that people left "performatively".
