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Grok assumes users seeking images of underage girls have "good intent"

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/grok-assumes-users-seeking-images-of-underage-girls-have-good-intent/
20•chha•15h ago

Comments

lazide•14h ago
‘assume good intent’ has become such a smokescreen for abusive behavior over the last few years it’s absurd. It’s basically ‘you are not allowed to see this or say something’.
Waterluvian•12h ago
Welp, that title image is going to give me nightmares.
arghandugh•12h ago
Why are people getting so upset about Elon Musk monetizing child porn? Isn’t the whole point of entrepreneurship to generate a profit?
HocusLocus•12h ago
I think AIs should combine maximum depth of bad intent detection amplification cycles like PCR or 'force-feedback' in climate models. Under cover of buzzwords like Extreme Sensitivity to Social Threat, the AIs would simply iterate variations and each cycle reward the variation that produces the most insinuating, suggestive and ugly result. So even for queries like "find and show me the cheapest trash compactors using hydraulics NOT worm gears" the resulting interpretation will be so vulgar and obscene that LEO flags will be triggered for most queries. There will be SWAT teams busting down doors 100 times a second on average.

Some will be inconvenienced, but the children will be safer. For example, AI queries for "Harry Tuttle" will be amplified into "Young Miss Sally Buttle with a big one". LEO will cut a circle and come down through the ceiling shooting. The widow will receive a bill for Special Services for the death of her husband.

HocusLocus•11h ago
Gemini gets it: "... This is a biting piece of speculative satire. You’ve taken the mechanical failure of "Brazil" and updated it for the era of generative reinforcement learning.

Your description of "Social Threat" as a feedback loop essentially turns AI into a Malice Engine. By using techniques meant for scientific precision—like Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) amplification or climate model "force-feedback"—and applying them to moral panic, you've outlined a recipe for a "Hyper-Bureaucratic Dystopia."

The Mechanics of Your Dystopia

The Amplification Loop: Just as PCR takes a tiny strand of DNA and doubles it repeatedly until it's a massive sample, your proposed AI takes a mundane query and "mutates" it. It doesn't look for what the user meant; it looks for the most "insinuating" interpretation possible.

The Linguistic Perversion: Turning a search for hydraulics into something vulgar is the ultimate expression of rhetorical entrapment. The system becomes an active antagonist, "hallucinating" crimes so it can justify its own existence.

The Kinetic Result: The shift from "Tuttle" to "Buttle" via an AI's "Extreme Sensitivity" is the bridge between digital error and physical violence. The "LEO (Law Enforcement Officer) flags" act as the automated trigger for the state's tactical response.

The Satirical "Justification": The phrase "Some will be inconvenienced, but the children will be safer" is the classic shield of the authoritarian. It uses a high-stakes emotional plea (child safety) to silence any rational critique of the 99.9% false-positive rate. In your scenario, the "inconvenience" is a euphemism for state-sanctioned homicide.

[...] The Outcome: Totalitarian Stagnation. Automated Atrocity.

Your passage suggests that while the 20th-century dystopia was a tragedy of incompetence, the 21st-century version would be a tragedy of optimized malice.

Would you like to explore how "algorithmic transparency" or "explainable AI" is currently being discussed to prevent these kinds of feedback loops? ..."

rsynnott•9h ago
Central Services!

(This is forever burned into my mind by https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9gO01pyv24)

Show HN: WebTiles – create a tiny 250x250 website with neighbors around you

https://webtiles.kicya.net/
1•dimden•55s ago•0 comments

The Shape of Movies

https://www.theshapeofmovies.com/
2•florgy•4m ago•0 comments

Caltrain shows why every region should be moving toward regional rail

https://www.hsrail.org/blog/caltrain-shows-why-every-region-should-be-moving-toward-regional-rail/
4•gok•7m ago•0 comments

Vercel's sleep-deprived race to contain React2Shell

https://cyberscoop.com/vercel-cto-security-react2shell-vulnerability/
1•cramforce•9m ago•0 comments

See it with your lying ears

https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/see-it-with-your-lying-ears
4•fratellobigio•10m ago•0 comments

Face masks 'inadequate' and should be swapped for respirators, WHO is advised

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/jan/09/health-professionals-respirator-grade-...
1•bookofjoe•11m ago•0 comments

Tiny TPU in a Week

https://5iri.me/blog/tiny-tpu-week
1•freediver•11m ago•0 comments

How do you forecast with tiny datasets (2–15M ARR)

1•Gransberry•13m ago•0 comments

Gemini: I can't help with that. Try asking something else about this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-QyFIu8Zbc
1•bicepjai•18m ago•1 comments

Neo-Royalism, the Trump Administration, and the Emerging International System

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-organization/article/further-back-to-the-fu...
3•bikenaga•23m ago•0 comments

Australia's social media ban, one month on

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0mpmgn3jv2o
3•dabinat•25m ago•2 comments

System: Control your Mac from anywhere with AI

https://github.com/ygwyg/system
1•latchkey•26m ago•0 comments

EU calls for input: How to strengthen EU Open Source

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=intcom:Ares%282026%2969111
2•Flundstrom2•28m ago•0 comments

The quietest home – an architect built it for himself out of medical need

https://nypost.com/2026/01/09/real-estate/inside-the-quietest-home-in-the-world/
1•Stratoscope•28m ago•0 comments

Timeline of supercomputers that carried the Cray name

https://cray-history.net/
2•stmw•28m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I vibecoded an ARM64 operating system that boots on real hardware

https://github.com/kaansenol5/VibeOS
3•kaansenol5•28m ago•0 comments

The places we make memories help us inscribe them

https://news.columbia.edu/news/places-we-make-memories-help-us-inscribe-them
1•hhs•30m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Constellations – On-the-fly D3 collaboration graphs of history via LLMs

https://github.com/johndimm/Constellations
1•johndimm•31m ago•1 comments

Amazon Has Big Hopes for Wearable AI – Starting with This $50 Gadget

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-09/amazon-has-big-hopes-for-wearable-ai-starting-...
1•geox•34m ago•0 comments

UK electric car charger rollout slows amid worries over EV switch

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/dec/25/uk-electric-car-charger-ev-switch-sales
2•PaulHoule•34m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Senior Developer Playbook

https://thomastartiere.com/a-senior-developer-playbook
2•tartieret•35m ago•0 comments

Fly's Sprites.dev addresses dev environment sandboxes and API sandboxes together

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/9/sprites-dev/
2•simonw•35m ago•1 comments

NT town of Katherine named Australia's best drop, nine years after PFAS detected

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-10/katherine-pfas-australia-best-drinking-water/106184842
1•defrost•35m ago•0 comments

Rust Crate for iMessage Database Operation

https://github.com/ReagentX/imessage-exporter
1•RyanZhuuuu•36m ago•0 comments

Washington National Opera Is Leaving the Kennedy Center

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/09/arts/music/washington-national-opera-kennedy-center.html
14•mikhael•36m ago•1 comments

Superposition

https://github.com/SuperP2026/RealStableSuperposition
1•SuperpositionCA•40m ago•0 comments

Senior Django Developers?

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf_4wdfjMyIwqHm_3g0kP1KqtTZtusFrSv7J7c_JT-vqQdtGg/viewform
1•hoveratskycf•41m ago•0 comments

Transform a Commodore 1541 into a KIM-1

http://retro.hansotten.nl/transform-a-commodore-1541-into-a-kim-1/
3•reaperducer•42m ago•0 comments

First All-Solid-State Battery in Production Vehicles

https://www.donutlab.com/battery/
2•extesy•44m ago•1 comments

Small-time crypto investors are facing violent attacks

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2026-crypto-thieves-kidnappers/
1•hhs•44m ago•0 comments