I am ignorant and I don't know how to quantify any of these things, but it just seems strange to me that entities accounting for such a large part of the US economy have no leverage over 47.
A topic in the news lately is the upcoming midterm elections. Could they not threaten him with an aggressive informational warfare type of campaign? After all, he benefitted from the coordinated influence campaign that russia undertook during the 2016 elections.
They have some leverage over his party politically or him as a candidate, but as a sitting president (especially one as unhinged as he is), his power is absurd.
Apple and Googles revenue combine to around 3% of US GDP (substantial!), but it’s not like they would threaten to take that elsewhere or stop selling in the US or something. The ways they can “hurt” Trump hurt them and the rest of the country also. But Trump can do targeted damage to them across many avenues with a stroke of the pen (or even a Tweet)
The article makes no sense to me. The original verge article wants X off the app store. This article says Apple isn't powerful to confront Trump, seemingly as an excuse for why they're leaving X on the store, and then goes on to say that, uh, Apple should kick X off the store.
Not only do apple and Google have a huge amount of power, but all anyone wants is for X off the app store, and apparently even this author agrees they're powerful enough for that.
So i don't see how Cook and Pichai are, in fact, anything but cowards
Apple nearly killed Tumblr over accidental third-party CSAM. Them not doing shit about Twitter[0] is complicity in my book.
As for the political content of this article, I would argue that Trump is a lot less powerful than John Gruber thinks. Certainly, Big Tech knew how to shut him up when he was doing an actual self-coup. What changed between Trump I and II is that the liberal establishment saw this act and realized they'd let Big Tech get away with murder. Antitrust is Big Tech's existential threat, and that's a power Trump absolutely does wield.
Of course, Trump is not the only person wielding this power. The EU, Japan, and other countries are passing laws to strip Apple of their power to control apps. So they need Trump to use US trade policy - the biggest lever we have[1] - to beat the EU into compliance with Apple's rules.
There's an additional wrinkle in this story, though. Musk isn't actually favored by Trump anymore. He was a Trotsky - useful to the Trump regime's ascendance to power but not necessary now that it's in place. I don't think Trump is actually defending Twitter from Apple's actions so much as this has always been the limit of Apple's power.
Going back to Tumblr, there's a reason Apple went after them. They were small, and easy to bully. For all Apple's grandstanding about "privacy is a human right", the only thing they did to stop, say, Facebook[0] was take away IDFAs. Facebook has blatantly violated Apple's guidelines time and time again, up to and including shipping ad tracking VPNs using Enterprise signing certs, which is extremely forbidden by Apple policy. If you or me did this, we'd be so blacklisted from writing iOS code we wouldn't even be able to open Swift Playgrounds on an iPad. And all this happened before Trump II figured out how to threaten the economy into compliance.
Twitter has shrunk from what they were pre-Musk, but they're still big enough that they can pay the third world to tell Americans why America should kill people who live in the third world. An iPhone that can't Tweet is materially worse, so Apple is going to let Twitter get away with murder (or, more specifically, trafficking CSAM). If you're big enough, the laws do not apply.
[0] It is always ethical to deadname corporations.
[1] This is literally the stick we used to copypaste DMCA 1201 into the local law of basically every country, over the objections of everyone including Americans!
> This one, I think, is worth picking. This is a moment when the App Store and Play Store can stand firmly on the side of longstanding and correct societal norms.
Counteroffer: the App Store and the Play Store will be used for the precise reason they were built, enforcing top-down social control.
Gruber, you've been far enough down this road to understand that you don't get a choice. Apple and Google can say "fuck you" all year, and you cannot "make" them do jack shit. You are either with them, or you leave for greener pastures. App distribution monopolies cannot be used for good, it's what people have said for fucking decades at this point.
This really isn’t the time to bootstrap an “App Stores are inherently bad” argument to complicate the matter. Sometimes the enemy of your enemy is your friend.
AFAIK Donald Trump has never been charged—let alone convicted—of sexual relations with a minor. He was also not convicted of sexual assault, even of an adult. (See https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-was-donald-trump-found-g...). Nevertheless, there are plenty of other reasons to despise him.
Also, the entire DF article at issue here takes Apple to task for cozying up to his administration.
I find this whole thing extremely tendentious. CSAM is illegal and people are banned from X for producing or posting it. Indecent faked pictures of public figures may be gross and indecent but it isn't clear they're always illegal and outrage is highly selective - there used to be one going around of Trump with a tiny penis. Anyway people get banned for that too.
People are mad at X for political reasons, and they think this is their lever to get rid of X. Obviously all social media platforms have people posting this garbage, and while they enforce the rules as much as they can, stuff slips through. X is not uniquely awful. It's just in the hands of the wrong guy. Elon may be a polarizing and offensive grifter, but I have zero interest in continuing to go down this road.
I think you are wrong to see this as purely political. Women being portrayed as nude, battered, covered in semen, and so on are genuinely horrified. Such images would not be tolerated if they were sourced from a political ally.
Furthermore, I don't think that fake nudes of the US President are morally equivalent to fake nudes of minor public figures who are 99% women, even if the law treats them the same. We need to take into account the completely different lives that men and women online experience, where women are constantly subjected to sexualization and abuse.
This is one of those topics that discussion on HN is hopeless because women are so underrepresented.
They aren’t tolerated on X, people get banned for this. That’s why the whole thing is so duplicitous. x is not different from other platforms in this regard. Grok on X was also limited to paying users because of this.
Illegality is a floor, not a ceiling. It is justified to adhere to and promote a morality that sets higher standards than the law, including taking the view that creating and distributing indecent images of people should be prohibited.
> I find this whole thing extremely tendentious. CSAM is illegal and people are banned from X for producing or posting it.
Remember that time Elon Musk apologized for banning someone that posted CSAM and then unbanned them? I sure do, considering that was the reason why I left Twitter three years ago.
> People are mad at X for political reasons, and they think this is their lever to get rid of X.
I don't give a shit about X. Truly, I wake up and exist for weeks at a time without realizing the website exists or that anything happened on it whatsoever.
What I'm laughing at is Apple, who has had decades to forfeit their App Store monopoly. They didn't, largely because of pants-on-head stupid ideologues like Gruber defending their backwards logic. And then again with the client side scanning controversy, and now again when Gruber is mad that the shoe is on the other foot.
Apple is fascist. That's all there is to it. It's just a long, painful let-down for certain cheerleaders who really, really want to see the App Store used as a cudgel for good, vindicating the bootlicking apologists who put us in this miserable position.
Can you provide a link with evidence of that? I haven't seen that reported.
I'd also note in advance there is a big difference in someone figuring out how to jailbreak Gemini or OpenAI, and then the companies responding swiftly to fix that, than what has been reported with Grok where it was basically wide open to create those images.
Grok has never been "wide open" to undress people. Anyone reporting that is being extremely duplicitous. Any image-to-image on Grok has stringent NSFW filters for exactly this scenario. People have worked out jailbreaks and those get dealt with.
Gemini and ChatGPT conversations are private, not public. A big part of the controversy over Grok is that it's happening in public on Twitter, often as direct replies to the user who's picture is being manipulated.
This is such a weird issue for me, who is blind. Did Grok undress people, or did Grok show extrapolated images of what people might look like undressed? The "undressed people" framing makes it sound like people physically had their clothes removed. Obviously this did not happen.
But, like.
If I have like ... a mole somewhere under my clothes, Grok cannot know about that right? People will know what they themselves look like naked?
Someone looking at Grok's output learns literally nothing about what the actual person looks like naked, right?
Kinda sounds like somebody should just make something that creates this for every picture ever? Then everybody has a defense -- "fake nudes!"
and the pictures are meaningless?
> This is such a weird issue for me, who is blind.
I'm not sure what your mental model is for someone's visual likeness.
I'd propose a blind-inclusive analogy of what is happening on Twitter is anyone can create a realistic sexdoll with the same face and body proportions as any user online.
Doesn't that feel gross, even if the sexdoll's genitalia wouldn't match the real person's?
I interpreted your last sentence as asserting it was no big deal (ie not gross) because it was all fake, but fair enough if you didn't mean it that way.
But to your main point: if you agree it's gross, do you not agree it is a violation of _something_? What is that thing if not privacy?
You may disagree, but 95% of people in the real world understand what "undressed" means in this context and see it as a gross invasion of privacy.
I knew when this issue hit the fan that you'd get hordes of overly-literal engineer types arguing that the person wasn't actually violated, or that "how is this any different from someone drawing a hyper-realistic picture of someone naked?" I can actually even (well, somewhat anyway) sort of understand this viewpoint. But if you want to die on this hill, you will, most people in the real world would condemn and ostracize you for this viewpoint.
This is the sort of thing that is technically correct, but misses the emotional aspect that people want to be able to control their public perception. Of course people could (and did) do this with older tools or by hand. It doesn't matter to them. And since Elon/X are the villain du jour, it's a good lever to punish them.
Use the mole example as referring to any physical characteristic hidden by clothing that people want to remain hidden. It's an example to demonstrate that the AI is not "undressing" anybody. It is filling in an extrapolation of pixels which have no clear relationship to the underlying reality. If you have a hidden tattoo, that tattoo is still not visible.
This gets fuzzy because literally everything is correlated -- it may be possible to infer that you are the type of person who might have a tattoo there? But grok doesn't have access to anything that hasn't already been shared. Grok is not undressing anybody, the people using it to generate these images aren't undressing anybody, they are generating fake nudes which have no more relationship to reality than someone taking your public blog posts and then attempting to write a post in your voice.
It is reductio ad absurdum applied correctly. I made a completely absurd proposal, because the response is obvious - any consideration of "fake porn being fake" will stop mattering super fast once actual faces are put in the picture.
Yeah the reason Google and OpenAI etc are silent is because their services do the same but they "aren't the bad guys" so if they shut up the crisis will pass.
This of course implies that the crisis itself and persecution of Musk/Grok is politically motivated, or just based on stupidity.
The same capabilities might be present in many available models, but I do think that the public/social aspect in usage is quite different— people can’t come into my Google account and save nudified versions of my family photos directly to my Google drive, but X generated a lot of attention because the users are directly replying or quoting other users and @ing them with the modified photos.
Post in question that this is just a comment on:
Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46560359
> It’s folly to think these CEOs should steer their companies into direct confrontation with Trump.
…Are Apple and Google combined really not powerful enough to take on Trump?
This smacks of learned helplessness to me.
Only at the expense of profits and they’d be damned if they let anything affect profits
No, they’re absolutely not
Only because they personally chose the 'obey in advance' starting with funding his inauguration and power leveled him up.
https://www.carnegie.org/our-work/article/twenty-lessons-fig...
I am ignorant and I don't know how to quantify any of these things, but it just seems strange to me that entities accounting for such a large part of the US economy have no leverage over 47.
A topic in the news lately is the upcoming midterm elections. Could they not threaten him with an aggressive informational warfare type of campaign? After all, he benefitted from the coordinated influence campaign that russia undertook during the 2016 elections.
They have some leverage over his party politically or him as a candidate, but as a sitting president (especially one as unhinged as he is), his power is absurd.
Apple and Googles revenue combine to around 3% of US GDP (substantial!), but it’s not like they would threaten to take that elsewhere or stop selling in the US or something. The ways they can “hurt” Trump hurt them and the rest of the country also. But Trump can do targeted damage to them across many avenues with a stroke of the pen (or even a Tweet)
Companies that big can do whatever they want. People just make excuses
The article makes no sense to me. The original verge article wants X off the app store. This article says Apple isn't powerful to confront Trump, seemingly as an excuse for why they're leaving X on the store, and then goes on to say that, uh, Apple should kick X off the store.
Not only do apple and Google have a huge amount of power, but all anyone wants is for X off the app store, and apparently even this author agrees they're powerful enough for that.
So i don't see how Cook and Pichai are, in fact, anything but cowards
Apple nearly killed Tumblr over accidental third-party CSAM. Them not doing shit about Twitter[0] is complicity in my book.
As for the political content of this article, I would argue that Trump is a lot less powerful than John Gruber thinks. Certainly, Big Tech knew how to shut him up when he was doing an actual self-coup. What changed between Trump I and II is that the liberal establishment saw this act and realized they'd let Big Tech get away with murder. Antitrust is Big Tech's existential threat, and that's a power Trump absolutely does wield.
Of course, Trump is not the only person wielding this power. The EU, Japan, and other countries are passing laws to strip Apple of their power to control apps. So they need Trump to use US trade policy - the biggest lever we have[1] - to beat the EU into compliance with Apple's rules.
There's an additional wrinkle in this story, though. Musk isn't actually favored by Trump anymore. He was a Trotsky - useful to the Trump regime's ascendance to power but not necessary now that it's in place. I don't think Trump is actually defending Twitter from Apple's actions so much as this has always been the limit of Apple's power.
Going back to Tumblr, there's a reason Apple went after them. They were small, and easy to bully. For all Apple's grandstanding about "privacy is a human right", the only thing they did to stop, say, Facebook[0] was take away IDFAs. Facebook has blatantly violated Apple's guidelines time and time again, up to and including shipping ad tracking VPNs using Enterprise signing certs, which is extremely forbidden by Apple policy. If you or me did this, we'd be so blacklisted from writing iOS code we wouldn't even be able to open Swift Playgrounds on an iPad. And all this happened before Trump II figured out how to threaten the economy into compliance.
Twitter has shrunk from what they were pre-Musk, but they're still big enough that they can pay the third world to tell Americans why America should kill people who live in the third world. An iPhone that can't Tweet is materially worse, so Apple is going to let Twitter get away with murder (or, more specifically, trafficking CSAM). If you're big enough, the laws do not apply.
[0] It is always ethical to deadname corporations.
[1] This is literally the stick we used to copypaste DMCA 1201 into the local law of basically every country, over the objections of everyone including Americans!
> This one, I think, is worth picking. This is a moment when the App Store and Play Store can stand firmly on the side of longstanding and correct societal norms.
Counteroffer: the App Store and the Play Store will be used for the precise reason they were built, enforcing top-down social control.
Gruber, you've been far enough down this road to understand that you don't get a choice. Apple and Google can say "fuck you" all year, and you cannot "make" them do jack shit. You are either with them, or you leave for greener pastures. App distribution monopolies cannot be used for good, it's what people have said for fucking decades at this point.
This really isn’t the time to bootstrap an “App Stores are inherently bad” argument to complicate the matter. Sometimes the enemy of your enemy is your friend.
[flagged]
> Tim Cook gave a convicted rapist a golden trophy for his manufacturing prowess
Citation, please?
Coming in hot!
https://www.theverge.com/news/737757/apple-president-donald-...
AFAIK Donald Trump has never been charged—let alone convicted—of sexual relations with a minor. He was also not convicted of sexual assault, even of an adult. (See https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-was-donald-trump-found-g...). Nevertheless, there are plenty of other reasons to despise him.
Also, the entire DF article at issue here takes Apple to task for cozying up to his administration.
[flagged]
You've posted more than one personal attack like this. That's not cool and not allowed on HN. No more, please.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
On what, exactly, in your confidence based?
In my experience, the most confident people are usually the ones who turn out to be most often wrong.
Counteroffer: the App Store and the Play Store will be used for the precise reason they were built, making their owners a shit-ton of money.
I find this whole thing extremely tendentious. CSAM is illegal and people are banned from X for producing or posting it. Indecent faked pictures of public figures may be gross and indecent but it isn't clear they're always illegal and outrage is highly selective - there used to be one going around of Trump with a tiny penis. Anyway people get banned for that too.
People are mad at X for political reasons, and they think this is their lever to get rid of X. Obviously all social media platforms have people posting this garbage, and while they enforce the rules as much as they can, stuff slips through. X is not uniquely awful. It's just in the hands of the wrong guy. Elon may be a polarizing and offensive grifter, but I have zero interest in continuing to go down this road.
I think you are wrong to see this as purely political. Women being portrayed as nude, battered, covered in semen, and so on are genuinely horrified. Such images would not be tolerated if they were sourced from a political ally.
Furthermore, I don't think that fake nudes of the US President are morally equivalent to fake nudes of minor public figures who are 99% women, even if the law treats them the same. We need to take into account the completely different lives that men and women online experience, where women are constantly subjected to sexualization and abuse.
This is one of those topics that discussion on HN is hopeless because women are so underrepresented.
They aren’t tolerated on X, people get banned for this. That’s why the whole thing is so duplicitous. x is not different from other platforms in this regard. Grok on X was also limited to paying users because of this.
Illegality is a floor, not a ceiling. It is justified to adhere to and promote a morality that sets higher standards than the law, including taking the view that creating and distributing indecent images of people should be prohibited.
Who decides on the morality?
Do you agree that unflattering fake nudes of Trump should also result in platforms being banned from the appstore?
> I find this whole thing extremely tendentious. CSAM is illegal and people are banned from X for producing or posting it.
Remember that time Elon Musk apologized for banning someone that posted CSAM and then unbanned them? I sure do, considering that was the reason why I left Twitter three years ago.
> People are mad at X for political reasons, and they think this is their lever to get rid of X.
I don't give a shit about X. Truly, I wake up and exist for weeks at a time without realizing the website exists or that anything happened on it whatsoever.
What I'm laughing at is Apple, who has had decades to forfeit their App Store monopoly. They didn't, largely because of pants-on-head stupid ideologues like Gruber defending their backwards logic. And then again with the client side scanning controversy, and now again when Gruber is mad that the shoe is on the other foot.
Apple is fascist. That's all there is to it. It's just a long, painful let-down for certain cheerleaders who really, really want to see the App Store used as a cudgel for good, vindicating the bootlicking apologists who put us in this miserable position.
[stub for offtopicness]
Users showed that Gemini and openAI also undress people, it’s not just grok.
Can you provide a link with evidence of that? I haven't seen that reported.
I'd also note in advance there is a big difference in someone figuring out how to jailbreak Gemini or OpenAI, and then the companies responding swiftly to fix that, than what has been reported with Grok where it was basically wide open to create those images.
Grok has never been "wide open" to undress people. Anyone reporting that is being extremely duplicitous. Any image-to-image on Grok has stringent NSFW filters for exactly this scenario. People have worked out jailbreaks and those get dealt with.
https://www.wired.com/story/google-and-openais-chatbots-can-...
https://hub.jhu.edu/2023/11/01/nsfw-ai/
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shubhank-suman-7995741b4_inve...
https://old.reddit.com/r/GeminiAI/comments/1oxrcd2/gemini_25...
Yes, all those articles are about people getting around the safeguards in different AI.
Gemini and ChatGPT conversations are private, not public. A big part of the controversy over Grok is that it's happening in public on Twitter, often as direct replies to the user who's picture is being manipulated.
This is such a weird issue for me, who is blind. Did Grok undress people, or did Grok show extrapolated images of what people might look like undressed? The "undressed people" framing makes it sound like people physically had their clothes removed. Obviously this did not happen.
But, like.
If I have like ... a mole somewhere under my clothes, Grok cannot know about that right? People will know what they themselves look like naked?
Someone looking at Grok's output learns literally nothing about what the actual person looks like naked, right?
Kinda sounds like somebody should just make something that creates this for every picture ever? Then everybody has a defense -- "fake nudes!" and the pictures are meaningless?
> This is such a weird issue for me, who is blind.
I'm not sure what your mental model is for someone's visual likeness.
I'd propose a blind-inclusive analogy of what is happening on Twitter is anyone can create a realistic sexdoll with the same face and body proportions as any user online.
Doesn't that feel gross, even if the sexdoll's genitalia wouldn't match the real person's?
What part of my original comment said it wasn't gross?
My point is that nobody is getting undressed and no privacy violation is being done. Fake nudes are fake.
I interpreted your last sentence as asserting it was no big deal (ie not gross) because it was all fake, but fair enough if you didn't mean it that way.
But to your main point: if you agree it's gross, do you not agree it is a violation of _something_? What is that thing if not privacy?
You may disagree, but 95% of people in the real world understand what "undressed" means in this context and see it as a gross invasion of privacy.
I knew when this issue hit the fan that you'd get hordes of overly-literal engineer types arguing that the person wasn't actually violated, or that "how is this any different from someone drawing a hyper-realistic picture of someone naked?" I can actually even (well, somewhat anyway) sort of understand this viewpoint. But if you want to die on this hill, you will, most people in the real world would condemn and ostracize you for this viewpoint.
This is the sort of thing that is technically correct, but misses the emotional aspect that people want to be able to control their public perception. Of course people could (and did) do this with older tools or by hand. It doesn't matter to them. And since Elon/X are the villain du jour, it's a good lever to punish them.
>If I have like ... a mole somewhere under my clothes, Grok cannot know about that right?
unless some ex spoke about that gross mole you had in twitter or some data that was scraped somewhere, no.
Not sure what the actual odds are of it knowing if you have a mole or not.
Use the mole example as referring to any physical characteristic hidden by clothing that people want to remain hidden. It's an example to demonstrate that the AI is not "undressing" anybody. It is filling in an extrapolation of pixels which have no clear relationship to the underlying reality. If you have a hidden tattoo, that tattoo is still not visible.
This gets fuzzy because literally everything is correlated -- it may be possible to infer that you are the type of person who might have a tattoo there? But grok doesn't have access to anything that hasn't already been shared. Grok is not undressing anybody, the people using it to generate these images aren't undressing anybody, they are generating fake nudes which have no more relationship to reality than someone taking your public blog posts and then attempting to write a post in your voice.
[flagged]
That crosses into personal attack in a particularly gross way. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't post like this again.
I fundamentally disagree.
It is reductio ad absurdum applied correctly. I made a completely absurd proposal, because the response is obvious - any consideration of "fake porn being fake" will stop mattering super fast once actual faces are put in the picture.
I dispute that I made any personal attack.
Yeah the reason Google and OpenAI etc are silent is because their services do the same but they "aren't the bad guys" so if they shut up the crisis will pass.
This of course implies that the crisis itself and persecution of Musk/Grok is politically motivated, or just based on stupidity.
The same capabilities might be present in many available models, but I do think that the public/social aspect in usage is quite different— people can’t come into my Google account and save nudified versions of my family photos directly to my Google drive, but X generated a lot of attention because the users are directly replying or quoting other users and @ing them with the modified photos.