Over the weekend, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney waded into the conversation about Grok – Twitter’s AI bot that is currently generating non-consensual, explicit images of others, particularly women and children.
To combat this, lawmakers around the world are considering taking action against Twitter until the issue is addressed. So far, Indonesia and Malaysia have banned Grok specifically, with the UK currently considering its own solution, not ruling out a complete ban of Twitter.
However, Tim Sweeney took issue with this. Instead, he accused lawmakers of only wanting Twitter banned so they can “censor all of their political opponents.” He also argued that all AI models have issues with users generating illegal material like CSAM (child sexual abuse material), suggesting that Grok shouldn’t be singled out.
Now, Sweeney is taking issue with how his comments are being reported in news outlets, specifically PC Gamer. PC Gamer’s summary of the situation reads: “Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney argues banning Twitter over its ability to AI-generate pornographic images of minors is just ‘gatekeepers’ attempting to ‘censor all of their political opponents’.” Which, you know, is exactly what he said.
Sweeney, however, was not a fan of how his own words were repeated back to him, and has decided to attack the publication in an attempt to clarify what he really meant – although that is not much different from what he said before.
“This is a vile lie by PC Gamer,” he says. “I criticized a government official for pressuring Apple and Google to block a speech app owned by their political opponent, deplatforming 500,000,000 users on the pretense of stopping a small number of users from distributing disgusting content.”
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“It makes no sense for game stores, where AI will be involved in nearly all future production.”
Again, Sweeney’s defence of Twitter was specifically in relation to the Grok controversy. I cannot see into the hearts and minds of the politicians calling for a Twitter ban, so perhaps this is only a pretence to get rid of an app they don’t like. But it could be argued that Twitter has given them plenty of reasons to do this in the past, like the spread of unchecked abuse and bigotry, with white supremacy running rampant on the platform.
And of course, something does need to be done about Grok being used to generate CSAM and non-consensual sexual images of adults. If the bans being proposed go ahead, and then lift if Twitter gets a grip on the situation, then political opponents will hardly be censored – just their ability to generate abusive material. The site might even become semi-tolerable if Grok is chucked in the bin, although it doesn’t seem likely that Elon Musk would ever part with his AI.
