It’s com­fort­ing to think that the ranks of those who wor­ry that the idiom “The world is going to Hell in a hand­bas­ket” is true, are swelling by the day. The dis­com­fort­ing, and per­force ignored fact, is that an equal­ly grow­ing num­ber are untrou­bled by the idiom  “Do not accept fools gladly.”

How else to explain why the claims of AI prof­i­teers, true, over-hyped or oth­er­wise, are tak­en at face val­ue, to the point where the likes of Elon Musk’s GROK, for one, can flourish?
The respect­ed tech­nol­o­gy mag­a­zine WIRED wrote that its “review of out­puts host­ed on Grok’s offi­cial web­site shows it’s being used to cre­ate vio­lent sex­u­al images and videos, as well as con­tent that includes appar­ent minors.”
A  sta­tis­ti­cal mod­el by the Cen­ter for Coun­ter­ing Dig­i­tal Hate esti­mat­ed that in a short peri­od, Grok cre­at­ed and post­ed just over three mil­lion images that “… con­tained sex­u­al­ized imagery of men, women or children.
”You read that right — chil­dren.
An online capa­bil­i­ty to undress women and make child pornog­ra­phy ought to affront any­one with an ounce of decency.
Those who can cre­ate that kind of com­put­er capa­bil­i­ty can sure­ly find a way to stop it metas­ta­siz­ing.  And why would any­one design it in the first place?
Did Musk and his geeks real­ly not antic­i­pate the “fea­ture” which enables could and would  be  “mis­used.” Or is it sim­ply a case of prof­it over probity?
Here’s the real ”bot­tom line”, Mr Musk: Cater­ing for per­verts makes you a pervert.

                             ALMOST AS BAD

In a case that is of less­er evil only in that it involves intel­lec­tu­al per­ver­sion as opposed to the usu­al kind, with­in a year the AI com­pa­ny Anthrop­ic  “…spent tens of mil­lions of dol­lars to acquire and slice the spines off mil­lions of books, before scan­ning their pages to feed more knowl­edge into the AI mod­els behind prod­ucts such as its pop­u­lar chat­bot Claude”,
There was no sug­ges­tion that what was code-named “Project Pana­ma” con­sid­ered ask­ing  authors and pub­lish­ers for per­mis­sion to use their books, or using some of the mil­lions spent on destroy­ing books, to pur­chase and dis­trib­ute them  to schools that might need them.
On the con­trary, an inter­nal plan­ning doc­u­ment called the project  “… our effort to destruc­tive­ly scan all the books in the world,” and empha­sised: “We don’t want it to be known that we are work­ing on this.”
That shrieks “make mon­ey and morals be damned”.

                  THEN THERE IS NOT SHRIEKING

In what pass­es for a scin­til­la of apol­o­gy, appar­ent­ly prompt­ed by  a pri­vate but cer­tain­ly roy­al­ly upset mes­sage from King Charles over his deeply insult­ing, even by his norms, alle­ga­tion that non-Amer­i­can troops who served  in Iraq and Afghanistan avoid­ed the front lines, Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump pecked out on his Truth Social out­let; “The UK mil­i­tary, with tremen­dous heart and soul, is sec­ond to none (except for the USA).”
Just for per­spec­tive, ear­ly in the Afghan inva­sion, I was chat­ting with a U.S. Marine offi­cer at Bagram air­base out­side Kab­ul, when a com­bat gear-laden pla­toon of British Roy­al Marines trudged by. “What do you think of them”, I asked, expect­ing the usu­al pro for­ma grat­i­tude due allies. The leader of men styled  as ‘The Few, the Proud’,  replied: “Man for man, they’re the finest infantry troops in the world. Bar none.”
By way of con­trast, when  British Home Sec­re­tary Sha­bana Mah­mood was asked if Trump’s tweet con­sti­tut­ed an apol­o­gy, she replied: “The pres­i­dent has his way.”
She should have said what a British squad­die would have, if he or she was being polite: “Not by a bloody long chalk.”
The deputy leader of the right wing UK Reform Par­ty, Richard Tice, was even more craven. He re-post­ed Trump’s post, and added: “Impor­tant to have the record set straight.”
Nei­ther of them come across as the kind of peo­ple with whom one would be hap­py to share a foxhole.
Dit­to Greg Swen­son, the chair of Repub­li­cans Over­seas UK, He told the BBC it was not in Trump’s nature to apol­o­gise, and added: “ What I would argue is the clar­i­fi­ca­tion is good news.”
A non-apol­o­gy apol­o­gy for a griev­ous insult  is  “good news”?
In that case: Sir, you’re  a**hole. But a per­fect one.
And then there is that oth­er great prac­ti­tion­er of  the black art of  avoid­ing any­thing that might get in the way of ambi­tion, Tony Blair.
As British Prime Min­is­ter at the time of 9/11, he pledged the U.K. would “stand shoul­der to shoul­der” with the U.S.  And indeed it did, send­ing troops to fight and die along­side Amer­i­cans in Afghanistan and Iraq, even though Blair should have known (and prob­a­bly did) that the lat­ter was a fool’s errand on behalf of a fool.
His pub­lic response to Trump’s con­tempt was…nothing.
Yet, the world is expect­ed to respect his forth­com­ing role as a lead­ing lumi­nary on Trump’s ”Board of Peace” for Gaza.
And there­in lies a clue to the ilk car­ry­ing the handbasket.

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