On January 14th, Elon Musk’s X announced that it would no longer be allowing its Grok AI tool to edit photos of real people to show them in revealing clothing, ‘in those jurisdictions where it’s illegal.’
This followed a sustained, days-long backlash to revelations that the tool was being used to create sexualised AI deepfake photographs of real people, including children. The service has been blocked in several countries, including Malaysia and Indonesia, while in the UK, broadcasting regulator Ofcom has launched a formal investigation into whether X has broken the law.
X may have backed down. But given that this came after several days of Musk complaining that the criticisms were ‘an excuse for censorship’, posting images of the British Prime Minister in a bikini, and indulging in more of his usual tedious schtick, I think it has to be clear to everyone that the writing is on the wall. Photographers, if you’re still using X – it’s time to stop.
Twitter was once a great thing for photography – a place of genuine connection. I used to co-run the weekly #WexMondays competition on Twitter, and we built up a brilliantly supportive community of photographers, sharing their images week to week, encouraging each other. There were plenty of other great ones too, and even beyond competitions, there just a wonderful sense of Twitter as a place where you could share photography with other people who loved photography.
But that’s gone. It’s not coming back. And it’s time for us photographers to go, too.
Before you send me an angry message that I won’t read because you’ll send me it on X and I’ve lost my X password – I do have some sympathy for those who are holding out. Those who don’t want to give up the communities they’ve found, or the followings they’ve built. But as the days go by, the userbase shrinks, and X continues its transformation into a fiefdom of Musk fanboys and white-nationalist extremists, clinging on because you don’t want to lose all your followers is starting to look a bit, well, sad.
I’m not going to try and sell you on the idea that there’s a community for photographers out there that’s anything like Twitter when it was great, because honestly there isn’t. Instagram is a bloated mess of autoplaying pop songs, re-uploaded TikToks, and people complaining about the algorithm. Threads is all the same people, still complaining about the algorithm. Bluesky is dull. Flickr is a ghost town. Facebook is Facebook.
If there is ever going to be another community like Twitter used to be, we are going to have to make it, and it may not be possible with the oligarch-owned tools we have now. It’s not clear what comes next, so I understand wanting to cling on to X, from that perspective.
But consider this. Grok is trained on data that users post to X. That means, if you have ever uploaded one of your photographs to X, then it is part of Grok’s dataset. And that means that it may have been used, in part, in the creation of an unsolicited, unconsenting sexualised image of a real person, possibly a child.
If that is not the line for you… what on earth is?
The views expressed in this column are not necessarily those of Amateur Photographer magazine or Kelsey Media Limited. If you have an opinion you’d like to share on this topic, or any other photography related subject, email: ap.ed@kelsey.co.uk.
