At this point it should be clear that they know that Grok is unsafe to use, and will generate potentially illegal content even without a clear prompt asking it to do so.
This is a dangerous product, the manufacturer _knows_ it is dangerous, and yet still they provide the service for use.
Possession of CSAM materials can be a criminal offence. Here in Canada, it doesn't matter if it's a sex doll that looks like a child, an imagined bit of erotica, or a drawing. And so, it is dangerous to use a tool that can inadvertently create such materials without user intent.
I actually think this is a profoundly interesting question and one that I'm interested in thinking about further.
I think it's a problem for society when bad behavior is not transgressive. And moreover I'm less certain about this one, but I sort of think theoretically that society should be more liberal than it's institutions, and it creates really weird feedback loops when the institutions are more "liberal" than the population naturally. (I'm using the term generically, not directly aligned with the political meaning)
I think the theory I would present is that people should not be encouraged to transgress further than they are impulsed to, but simultaneously people need an outlet to actually transgress in a way that is not acceptable! People shouldn't post edge memes because the algorithm encourages it. People should post edgy memes because it's transgressive! But when the institutions actually encourage it? How broken is it that you can't be an edgy teenager because edgy is the culture and not the counter-culture.
In 2025, I think the truly transgressive activity is to not be online. Is to be straight-edge. And I sort of wonder if this is a small part of the young male mental-health crisis. They're not telling edgy jokes to be closer to their friends, they're telling edgy jokes to get fake internet points so people click on more advertising. How fucked is that?
But it's like weird that kids are probably having less sex, drinking, smoking etc. then the institutions would have it.
So to kind of answer your question,
"In the 1990's, popular youth culture generally rebelled against this type of worry from adults but now even the youth are part of the moral witch-hunt for some reason."
This might explain how I, a formerly "edgy" gen-x 90's kid am heartily against institutions supporting this kind of behavior, while simultaneously supporting people engaging in it. The adults; X, parents, etc. SHOULD be worrying about this kind of stuff SO THAT popular youth culture can continue to rebel against it.
Could you clarify what you mean by "institution"? What institution is actively encouraging transgression? Do you mean the cultures on social media that socially reward transgression? Isn't that just people and their culture, not an institution? Or is there something social media companies are actively doing to promote specific transgressions?
I'm thinking about the 80s-90s worries about Christian heresy. Popular culture was (and still is) full of insults against Christianity, probably because that was the kind of thing that offended an older generation in the west at the time. Is it wrong for institutions to encourage that?
While I have my own personal moral standards, I see society in general as morally relativist and don't accept arguments that the popular morals of today are right because they're popular now, while the popular morals of previous generations were wrong because they contradict the "right" morals of today. That's why I don't have much respect for people trying to enforce their own culture's arbitrary morals while not equally respecting conflicting morals.
> when bad behavior is not transgressive
That's a tricky one because what's "bad behavior"? Does it include denying the existence of God?
For what it's worth I'm making an argument that is probably completely unfeasible and with morally rocky foundations, but -
> While I have my own personal moral standards, I see society in general as morally relativist and don't accept arguments that the popular morals of today are right because they're popular now, while the popular morals of previous generations were wrong because they contradict the "right" morals of today
While I agree with you morally, I think practically for the stability of society it's useful for there to be a relatively conservative (and not overly litigious) mainstream that people can choose to freely act outside of, and it doesn't entirely matter what that mainstream is. I am not morally aligned with the say they Reagan era moral majority who fought against foul language on TV and in music, but I think there is a value in having that "moral majority" to rebel against.
There was this sort of lightning in a bottle in the second half of the 20th century, or maybe this has always been an Western thing but - there was this strong conservative popular culture - you couldn't even swear on television - but transgression wasn't handled legally (at least not excessively so). So you could go see a transgressive comedian if you wanted to, but it was necessarily a subculture, and I think this idea is healthy for society. Strong social pressure in one direction, but an escape hatch from it if you want in communities that aren't part of the popular culture.
So yes, I would say X is an institution, and maybe if I had my way, X wouldn't even allow swearing. If you wanted to swear on the internet, you would have to find a relatively "underground" place to do it; you could do it on say a private forum, but not on anything with more than I dunno, 1 million users or something. But when X as an institution tells you that everything is ok; when basically ideas or pictures or movies stop being "dangerous" people stop being "dangerous". There's no unique thought because all ideas are part of the mainstream. I think it creates less free thought, not more.
But in summary to speak to your question directly - I think I'm making a very counter-intutive argument that the thing you say you want, people from the 90's who valued dangerous media doesn't exist anymore. I think in a sense, the folks on X are not all that 90's kid, they’re all the "moral majority" the 90's kid was railing against; In a perverse manner of speaking.
It's hardly a hunt when there's bunch of warty green women with black tipped hats openly stirring a cauldron going "Double double toil and trouble."
The world grew up and learned better. We've seen the effects that bullying, including cyberbullying, have on people. We've seen teenagers (and adults) get harassed with fake revenge porn.
Both of those things have and do motivate people to perform harm in the real world. It's not random beeps and boops that are nonsensical and challenging to manipulate behavior through.
> Where are the upsides in CSAM - whether real or computer generated? How does it benefit society?
In a public forum like X, there probably are no upsides.
In general, though, pedophilia exists. This isn't something that is going to change. What is the harm in providing them with a alternative to real CSAM (which actually and actively hurts children)?
Giving them no legal avenue allows us to put more of them in jail. Once they are in jail the odds of them molesting children goes from "possible very low but measurably above zero" to "~0."
I think you are looking at it from the point of it being a punishment for victimizing someone -- when in fact it's used not to punish crime but to put away people who potentially might victimize someone in the future.
Likewise, I feel happy when using Emacs in a way that other editors do not. Emacs was made for a different era of development, with different views on what productive programming looked like. Rider, VSCode, and etc are all post-NetBeans editors and it shows. Editing text buffers isn't the focus so much as refactoring projects is; and agentic AI development slots easily into that refactoring process. With Emacs, it _feels_ purposeful, manual, and dare I say it, artisanal.
Valve contributes effort to Wine via Proton, and provides open source software like Steam Audio.
EA does something similar, and their EASTL is an opinionated and gaming-focused container and algorithms library that they maintain and made open source.
Many corporations are free-riding on the Open Source they use. As most of us are honestly.
But I think people cynically underestimate the value of the contributions corporations do make and fail to understand just how much of the software we enjoy is only possible due to corporate funding.
Igalia may be a good example as most of have are not even familiar with them. But the Linux distro that I use comes from their, the Servo browser is being driven by them, and many other projects benefit from their contributions.
While true, people should pay attention that WinRT, the technology infrastructure for UWP, nowadays lives in Win32 and is what is powering anything CoPilot+ PC, Windows ML, the Windows Terminal rewrite, new Explorer extensions, updated context menu on Windows 11,....
It is a moving target, Proton is mostly stuck on Windows XP world, before most new APIs started being a mix of COM and WinRT.
Even if that isn't the case, almost no company would bother with GNU/Linux to develop with Win32, instead of Windows, Visual Studio, business as usual.
Not to disagree, but proton has made it quite easy to run games I've previously struggled with. The nice thing is that it works with any binary, not just those you've purchased. Yes, it's wine, but valve has done wonders for its performance and compatibility.
And if it doesn't wanna work on Proton, GEProton might work. I've had a few games like that. (I usually default to the latter and use the former as a fallback.)
At this point I think it's incumbent on those who defend the American system to provide evidence that their justice system is not pliable with wealth, that it is a meaningful threat to business and not simply an acceptable accounting risk.
How much do pardons go for these days? One to six million?
As Carney put it, the first and most important difference between the USA and Canada is that Canada enjoys the rule of law.
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