Alan Kohler, Australian Broadcasting Corporation; AI platforms like Grok are an ethical, social and economic nightmare — and we're starting to wake up
"As 2025 began, I thought humanity's biggest problem was climate change.
In 2026, AI is more pressing...
Musk's xAI and the other intelligence developers are working as fast as possible towards what they call AGI (artificial general intelligence) or ASI (artificial superintelligence), which is, in effect, AI that makes its own decisions. Given its answer above, an ASI version of Grok might decide not to do non-consensual porn, but others will.
Meanwhile, photographic and video evidence in courts will presumably become useless if they can be easily faked. Many courts are grappling with this already, including the Federal Court of Australia, but it could quickly get out of control.
AI will make politics much more chaotic than it already is, with incredibly effective fake campaigns including damning videos of candidates...
But AI is not like the binary threat of a nuclear holocaust — extinction or not — its impact is incremental and already happening. The Grok body fakes are known about, and the global outrage has apparently led to some controls on it for now, but the impact on jobs and the economy is completely unknown and has barely begun."
