I’m making no promises with the regularity of Sidenotes but as I got my first PAID subscriber and a whole slew of follows from my report into Alex Proud for London Centric, here’s another one!
Isn’t it funny - funny awful not funny haha - that this time last year, Elon Musk was calling for the UK to launch a new inquiry into grooming gangs, supposedly to better protect children and young women, and now he’s presiding over a site that the UK might potentially ban if it doesn’t adhere to rules on creating child abuse images?
Grok, in case you haven’t heard, is Twitter (sorry, X!)’s AI function and a load of creeps (men) have been using it to not just nudify women and children but put them into suggestive poses and even distort their bodies. There’s one guy I’ve seen (come on, it’s a guy), requesting that Grok turn women into distended vessels of fatal quantities of water. He wants to see women’s tummies bulge and extend and I just need to know he lives far, far away from any human he might hurt.
Some might say it’s an odd hill for the UK Government to die on, what with US officials suggesting sanctions could be put on the country if it decides (I mean, if Ofcom decides on the basis of finding illegal content being happily created by the site) to go after X. But to me, it makes absolute sense. The Government has already committed to halving violence against women and girls and already had the Tory-era Online Safety Act in place to tackle the sharing of nonconsensual sexual images of adults. I’m so pleased that, since I wrote this story for Stylist, the Government has actually implemented the Data (Use and Access) Act which bans the creation or request of nonconsensual sexual images. And in due course, it will ban all nudifying apps.
Not only does this crackdown on Grok signify a kickback against technocrats like Musk, but suggests that Labour - just like the Conservatives who’re promising a ban on under 16s using social media - knows how much, in these winter months especially, we all hate how interminably online we’ve all become. These guys have taken our attention, and for what? Apparently ‘screen time’ is the new villain in Toy Story 5 (Greta Lee playing Lilypad!) and I can completely get behind that. One step further would be to remove all official Government business from the site, and discourage public-ish services from using it e.g. transport.
I remember the old Brass Eye sketch where a reporter gets cut-out images of toy dolls and patches them on to cut-outs of grown women, animals and other kinds of toys, before asking an expert in obscene publications what his take is. It’s funny, the absurdity of this man taking the images seriously. It’s also funny that we imagine him imagining some artist pasting these composites together and actually taking them seriously, too.
Now, though, AI requires little effort from its prompters, fewer boundaries for it to create things that are truly obscene, especially now its realism surpasses human detection. Our brains might one day be able to see all the tells in current AI, just like we outgrew feeling too awed by the No Scrubs video. But right now, Grok’s images are barely distinguishable from real people, real children. Elon Musk, by taking this function member only, now offers a paid-for service for paedos and perverts. Someone - someone who is not me and has no fear of litigation - might wonder who the “pedo guy” is now? I look forward to seeing what Ofcom does next.
For fans of #vanlife videos and specific globe-trotting travelling men like Niko Omilana, sambikepackingtheworld, Ride With Ian and that guy who, er, uses medical research fraud litigation to fund his cycling trips around the world… basically, if you like modern travel videos. But maybe find them too hectic, with too much in-built jeopardy and performing? Or too scattergun in their delivery, arriving every now and then on social media and just upping our screen time and contributing to a horrible situation in which our eyeballs are paying for others’ freedom…?
Then I really can recommend Michael Palin’s gentler travelogue series. I am going through them all, chronologically, starting with Around the World In 80 Days on iPlayer and now safari-deep in Pole to Pole. Amidst some of the more jingoistic quips and outré asides, Palin has a really heartfelt way of observing how different people do things differently and why. The show has become its own historical artefact, too; you get to see Ethiopians literally tearing down symbols of socialist rule, Russia letting Western journalists - the BBC, even! - behind the Iron Curtain before it fell. (I guess one of the things about living through history is you see all of the many, many baby steps that happen to make things so, without realising that in future it’ll all be condensed into one or two sentences; David Hasselhoff toppling the Berlin Wall and everyone home in time for currywurst). I didn’t know that Evening Standard sellers in Oxford Circus had always been so grumpy, that people could just live in water-locked villages until the 90s (a little Google Maps search suggests that’s still a thing today) or that TV presenters would just, you know, get naked on screen.
Of course, I always knew that it’s really, really easy to travel if you’re a man, but I guess that’s another topic for another day.
I’ve never been one of those people who watch things to go to sleep, but the pacing of this is spot on if you fancy maybe accidentally snoozing along.
As I watched Sydney Sweeney’s Courchevel holiday dump, wondering how French ski resorts ended up looking quite so much like a glittering labubu(s? what’s the plural?), I found myself wondering if Scooter Braun, who’s dating the noted registered Republican, is also a Republican.
After all, this is the guy who stole all of Taylor Swift’s songs, right? This is the guy who was “managing” Justin Bieber when he was abandoning capuchin monkeys? Turns out he’s a Democrat! And while Wikipedia can tell you he’s hosted Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris’s campaign parties, according to my analysis of information available on OpenSecrets.org, he’s donated a sum total of £245,995 to Democrat causes???
If you want me to dive into something weird and irrelevant, please let me know! I’ll find it out! Maybe? Definitely if you pay me
What would YOU do with over £800,000 of public money given to you to prop up your failing businesses during Covid? Well, I certainly wouldn’t spend £77,700 of it on a vintage Lamborghini. And I’m not saying anyone has done that with public money, just that a source close to the sale told me, for this article for London Centric, that club owner Alex Proud bought that exact car a mere month after Arts Council England gave him a £160k instalment of over £800k of public cash…
Interestingly, a man who used to “employ” me as an intern on a long-term basis has got in touch on Facebook (of course!) to tell me Alex has created many jobs. I have no doubt he has!
The delicious Monica Heisey is now on Substack, go enjoy her first post!
A little precursor of the current protests in Iran, looking at the Women, Life, Freedom movement. When history goes on to condenss everything into two little sentences, let the first be about how hard these women pushed back against theocratic patriarchy!
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