It’s hard to believe that in less than a week an AI company can have a scandal over its chatbot calling itself “MechaHitler” and receive $200 million from the Defense Department to use said chatbot, but that’s Donald Trump’s America for you.

Speaking of Trump’s America, it turns out we’re not getting the “Epstein Files” his administration has been teasing for the past six months. More on that and how the MAGA obsession with deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein is a big deflection from actual trafficking and abuse victims after the break.

First, I want to go back to Elon Musk’s xAI company, its chatbot Grok, and how the X social media platform (formerly Twitter) has been weaponized as a tool of AI-automated sexual abuse and bigotry. This is something I’ve covered a lot, starting with my NBC News reporting on nonconsensual sexually-explicit deepfakes featuring children’s bodies and faces going viral on X under Musk’s leadership.

One of the most concerning aspects of the rise of consumer generative AI products is how the technology has been used to produce (and monetize) sexually abusive material at scale. First, we saw this with deepfake “face-swaps” and “nudify” apps that advertise the ability to “undress” pictures of anyone. Now, we’re seeing it with built-in platform features like Grok, which has been prompted to create sexually-suggestive images and write graphic rape fantasies.

I’m going to link to an example of the latter, but please heed my warning that it’s hard to read. It made me nauseous and I have to look at this stuff all the time.

If you’re very online, you probably already know who Will Stancil is. If you aren’t, he’s a policy researcher, prolific poster, and former candidate for the Minnesota House. As he put it to me, he’s a “persistent target” of the far-right and sometimes the left, too. As Grok was embracing Nazism last week, some of Stancil’s harassers got it to post extremely graphic instructions on how it would break into Stancil’s home, rape him, kill him, dispose of his body, etcetera.

This is obviously awful on its face, but it also illustrates what is so dangerous about AI-enabled harassment compared to traditional forms of online and offline harassment. It creates a simple, intuitive, and even automated way to scale up the abuse and its impact.

“Unlike posts made by one weird person, this was hundreds and hundreds of posts, all at once,” Stancil said in an interview. “It would take three seconds to put in a prompt and it would spit out these sexually violent fantasies […] the tool for producing it is so simple, you just have to ask.”

As a reminder, this is now a chatbot being used by the federal government. Stancil posted that he’s interested in exploring options for legal recourse. The last time I wrote about Grok’s sexual harassment, I spoke to Dr. Mary Anne Franks about what legal options could be possible. This would be the first case of its kind.

Franks, who has years of experience developing new ways to apply the law against digital forms of gender-based violence, always points out the structural barriers for victims of all forms of sexual violence to get justice. And when it comes to online violence, a lot of people dismiss it as not “real.” But as journalist Alia Dastagir wrote about in her book on online harassment, the physical, emotional, and psychological toll of it is remarkably similar to offline forms of violence.

“When you’re a nonstop target of abuse, it’s really difficult to put up mental boundaries, even when it’s not explicitly violent and sexual, to not let it inform your own image of yourself,” Stancil said. “You internalize it in a way that feels like a physical weight coming down on you.”

Stancil’s case ties together a lot of the trends I’ve covered regarding AI, internet culture, and sexual violence with the ugliest possible bow. This type of AI-driven, automated sexual harassment is already widespread and getting worse. It victimizes men and boys in addition to women and girls. It has pervasive and real consequences. And it’s being normalized and institutionalized in front of our very eyes.

For Trump supporters, releasing the ‘Epstein Files’ isn’t about getting justice for his victims

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