Talk Liberation is committed to providing equal access for individuals with disabilities. To view an accessible version of this article, click here.

The escalating pushback against AI adoption has gone global, with a 30-year-old New Zealand woman being arrested for spray-painting “Hire Humans” onto a Burger King drive-thru in Dunedin, in the South Island of New Zealand. As reported by Stuff, a major New Zealand online news outlet, “A person wearing a white mask reportedly entered the drive-thru area on foot, and spray-painted ‘Hire humans’ in white spraypaint on the drive-thru speaker… She told police that she did the graffiti because she was annoyed with companies, like Burger King, using AI technology instead of employing humans.”

Stuff then included a video at the bottom of its coverage - not of the act of protest, but of one of its reporters testing the efficacy of the Burger King AI ordering system to check whether it was able to cope with her chopping and changing various parts of its order. It was. “No mistakes… it seems like quite a straight forward process. Nice” nods its reporter at the end of the clip.

Nothing could better exemplify frustration with how AI is presented to the public -where an act of profound disgruntlement is smoothed over with what is effectively unpaid or undeclared advertising both of Burger King and its AI service within the same page.

Unmentioned by Stuff’s reporter is what is really going on under the hood as she speaks to the AI. Something as simple as ordering a burger is now an opportunity for corporations to gather key identifying information about consumers. From recording our voiceprints, to collecting and storing metadata such as when you order a burger; what you order; with what frequency; where and in what volumes, coupled with your payment information - methods of payment, type of payment, size of payment - these are all data points that can be used not only to profile your customer-ship but are also pushed upstream to AI providers to be shared with countless ‘marketing partners’ around the world and even with governments, police and security agencies.

That the Stuff reporter seems blissfully ignorant of this as she chirps her order to the AI and declares it “straight forward”, is a huge part of the problem.

But it’s not only the customers being stripped of their privacy - there is broader societal damage to the work and labour force, as AI systems begin to replace line staff, depriving low and middle income sectors of job opportunities that were traditionally available. In a prior article about Burger King’s AI ordering system rollout in New Zealand in mid-2025, the (now-closed) comments section showed citizens expressing similar concerns:

For students in particular but also other sectors of society, employment at a fast food restaurant was a normal rite of passage, with work and management training programmes often leading to an important transition into other employment sectors.

A rung on the career ladder is now missing in action for countless real people, impacting families and their communities. As the AI rollouts scale and more citizens are impacted, the reactions and objections are likely to become even more vehement.

Wikipedia frames AI discontent as being “controversies”, recounting a series of events from an early Microsoft Twitter chatbot disaster in 2016 that ended up having to be discontinued, to the recent scandal of sexualised deepfake images being widely created and circulated by GrokAI.

Wikipedia states: “While advocates emphasize the technology's potential to solve complex problems and enhance human quality of life, detractors highlight a wide array of dangers and challenges. These include concerns over ethics, plagiarism and theft, fraud, safety and alignment, environmental impacts, technological unemployment, and the spread of misinformation. It also covers severe future or theoretical challenges, such as the emergence of artificial superintelligence and existential risks.”

Interestingly, some mainstream media have done a little bit better than just chalking it all up to controversies. In a surprisingly nuanced piece last October Newsweek titled “The AI Backlash Is Here: Why Public Patience With Tech Giants Is Running Out” Newsweek say that Generative AI has been “wildly oversold” and raise the now obvious spectre that AI is a giant investment bubble waiting to burst.

Business Insider published a piece by a reporter who actually attended an anti-AI protest, specifically a QuitGPT protest at the beginning of this month, held outside OpenAI’s headquarters. Many protesters views are directly quoted and in a refreshingly frank and genuine way.

In “The Public Opposition To AI Infrastructure Is Heating Up” TechCrunch covered in detail and at length, the issue of the environmental impacts of AI data centres and both legal and legislative efforts to rein them in, stating: “Environmental activists have long taken aim at data centers, but the more recent concerns have come from high-level lawmakers, drawing on populist anger at the tech industry broadly.”

The absence of open hostility, arrogance or mocking tones on display by the mainstream media towards members of the public who have serious concerns about AI suggests that the worry is more widespread than can be contained and/or that the media themselves share the concerns. For their own workplaces are being subjected to the same types of experimentation and job losses as the fast food industry.

Analysis of media industry layoffs in 2025 was already nothing short of devastating and 2026 is unlikely to be any better. At this rate, it may not be long before we see journalists themselves getting arrested for spray-painting “Hire Humans” on the doors of their own media outlets.

And many will cheer them on.

There is a gap between what you hear about and what you really need to know. We’re here to fill it. Welcome to The Disconnect - our newest publication showcasing public interest stories relating to internet freedom, privacy, AI, tech law, biometrics, surveillance, malware and data breaches, kept simple and delivered straight to your inbox as part of your regular Talk Liberation subscription. This news is too important to paywall - so we have kept it free for all. Please support us by subscribing, sharing and spreading the word!

This edition of The Disconnect was written by REAL HUMANS with no AI involved in any part of the production of this article. All the more reason to please support us :). If you love what we’re doing, please consider contributing $5 per month so that we can continue providing you with this vital, unique digest.

Remember to SUBSCRIBE and spread the word about this unique news service.

This News Report was produced by the Talk Liberation Digital Media Team, and is brought to you by Panquake.com – We Don’t Hope, We Build!

© Talk Liberation Limited. The original content of this article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Please attribute copies of this work to “Talk Liberation” or Talkliberation.com. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact licensing@talkliberation.com.

What do Nazi films, abortion images, a self-incriminating Grok AI, a Twitter competitor and a Russian oligarch husband all have in common? Read on to find out, in this amazing and yet very contemporary and relevant post with a foreword by Panquake Founder Suzie Dawson.

AI Isn’t Intelligent But It Sure Is Artificial - by Suzie Dawson

Like all computing, AI is a set of instructions that grant permissions to access functionality sets. Nothing about it is esoteric, metaphysical nor conscious. It is embedded in user interfaces that provide responses to prompts within predefined parameters configured by its very fallibly human creators. Everything else is just marketing.

Automation has long been a thing. Taking a manual work flow and automating it to increase speed and efficiency. Batch operations. Sequencing. Everything in computing is an instruction and exponential increases in computing power over time speed up, add capacity, but don’t fundamentally change the underlying truths of what code is, what any operating system is. The creator of such is the one who defines what permissions and functions will be made available to other user levels - in exchange for what, and what preconditions must apply.

It all boils down to a fundamental: a precondition (rule) met, triggers a response (operation).

If this, then that.

Logic. Math. Code. Science.

“The marketing campaigns pushing AI constantly seek to dazzle, presenting what is in most cases rather mundane innovation as being steeped in a kind of deep and wondrous mystery. Suckers buy in to this left, right and centre. Because “the machine is intelligent” is an easier and more convenient story than what is really going on under the hood.” - Talk Liberation Founder, Suzie Dawson

‘The singularity’ is actually just a really large set of integrated (connected) databases pooling data across clusters of servers. It isn’t a high water mark in technological development and certainly not in machine intelligence. It’s an achievement in homogenisation of data sources and therefore in conformity of output.

AI in its physical form - and it is physical, because all files and databases ultimately exist only because of their underlying hardware and infrastructure - still has all the design elements and appearances of software development product.

It has use cases, it has workflows. It is commonly integrated into a user interface, in order to be made more accessible to users, who increasingly - we are now told - have to be trained to use it.

Why do we have to be trained to use a consciousness? Because it isn’t sentient, it’s artificial. Inorganic. It has fixed capacities and requires inputs to operate. That’s why it has technical documentation and user help guides.

The marketing campaigns pushing AI constantly seek to dazzle, presenting what is in most cases rather mundane innovation as being steeped in a kind of deep and wondrous mystery. Suckers buy in to this left, right and centre. Because “the machine is intelligent” is an easier and more convenient story than what is really going on under the hood.

Strip away the layers of ‘sell’ from what AI is presented to be and what you find is something we actually always had: complex algorithms, built out to be even more complex over time. Expanded sets of instructions, with more fine-grained sets of permissions and more complex conditionals. Backed by more sophisticated hardware and therefore persistently faster operations. What they’re calling “AI” has been around for decades. It is general purpose computing. And it isn’t magic. It’s science.

“Like all computing, AI is a set of instructions that grant permissions to access functionality sets. Nothing about it is esoteric, metaphysical nor conscious. It is embedded in user interfaces that provide responses to prompts within predefined parameters configured by its very fallibly human creators. Everything else is just marketing.” - Talk Liberation founder, Suzie Dawson

Similarly, search functionality such as that employed by search engine web crawlers, aggregation of content and even the ability to mish-mash data into something ‘new’ (derivative) are old innovations too. Current AI implementations are essentially a web of complex RSS feeds that they keep to themselves rather than embedding them or streaming them to you. They then allow you to access tiny portions of the dataset while in many cases making you pay for the privilege. And if they don’t like what the algorithm returns from the dataset, then it is manipulated to produce a different outcome. The opposite of independence, autonomy or consciousness.

To integrate an AI product is to make yourself, your network, your data, your systems transparent to it. As well as to expose your contacts and communications with others. That data then flows upstream to the service provider. In other words, the AI hoovers up everything it can and returns it to its actual master, which is not you. When you pay for an AI service, you are paying to be surveilled; to be profiled; to be stripped bare and stored somewhere you do not control and cannot access, in perpetuity.

AI and privacy cannot co-exist. They are a contradiction in terms. Any use of the AI involves giving it data. It’s like tossing a bottle into the ocean. You are unlikely to ever know or understand where it is going to end up or in whose possession it will one day be. Or whether someone will smash it to smithereens and give a shard each to 500 friends - some of whom may not be so friendly at all.

AI is a repackager, a reproducer. AI is not a creator, because AI can only operate within the confines and boundaries - or the lack thereof - set for it by its actual creators.

“AI and privacy cannot co-exist. They are a contradiction in terms.” - Talk Liberation founder, Suzie Dawson.

The Talk Liberation Substack has been extensively covering the pitfalls of AI (to put it mildly) for years now. You will find dozens of meticulously sourced articles in our back catalog about this topic. We have been constantly warning of much of what is already unfolding now, especially in the context of social media. And our software development house is constantly innovating solutions in the form of software products that do not touch AI at any layer.

It is incredibly easy to pollute the well of globally integrated AI feeds with baseless smears and misinformation. All it takes these days is one unfounded claim on any random blog or social media post to do it. Before you know it, that false data has been propagated across thousands of corporate networks. The universal source of systemic truth relied on by an increasing number of governmental, financial, legal and corporate systems has never been more polluted.

True story: last year, I was at a compliance meeting with an international financial institution and they asked me about my “Russian oligarch husband”. I just about choked in surprise, then laughed my head off. Not only have I never been married - I have never dated anyone in Russia, and I have never in my life even met an oligarch, let alone married one. But these systems don’t have powers of discernment beyond adhering to their coded rulesets. Which are predicated upon harvesting more and more data, from wherever they can get their hands on it, regardless of how dubious the source. (Or more correctly; from whatever they can integrate with, or scrape, in order to obtain it.)

Our corporate risk profiles are in many cases being unreasonably inflated and then held against us regardless of the efficacy, or lack thereof, of the “information” contained within them. In that one situation I just recounted, the provider at least had the decency to ask me directly about my (non-existent) oligarch husband. Many, many other institutions don’t or won’t, and instead just render quiet judgement without disclosure, depriving us of any opportunity for correction let alone redress for the resulting damage and opportunity cost.

I have refrained from making inputs into AI-integrated systems for as long as they have been commercially available. I avoid them like the plague. Yet on a whim, I recently used Grok’s tweet analysis function to assess for myself the quality of the output and was absolutely floored to discover that Grok AI’s answer - and its sourcing - was completely without foundation.

And that’s putting it nicely.

What follows below is a post by the Talk Liberation digital media team, explaining what occurred and why it is so deeply problematic. It is my hope that our readers will take note of the warnings within. Because it is more clear than ever, that AI cannot be trusted to produce a credible record. As ever - it is up to us to do that for ourselves.

- Suzie Dawson

Grok AI Says It “Erred” In Associating Twitter Competitor With Nazi Films, Abortion Images

A Name, A Reputation, and the “Grokaganda” That Smeared A Truthteller

Talk Liberation founder, Suzie Dawson: spelled with one “z”, an “i” and an “e”. This isn’t exactly a complex cipher, but for an artificial intelligence system touted as a pinnacle of digital intelligence, it proved an insurmountable challenge. More concerning than the typo, however, was what followed: a cascade of false associations, a digital smear built not on malice, but on the volatile and often reckless nature of modern AI.

Suzie used the term “Grokaganda” to describe this specific phenomenon: the way AI tools like Grok can generate outputs that subtly or blatantly reinforce certain biases, misrepresent people, and shape narratives with a false veneer of algorithmic authority. We did not expect her to become a case study this quickly.

The incident was as absurd as it was damaging. In analyzing a tweet from Suzie, Grok didn’t just fail to spell her name correctly, it then attempted to substantiate its analysis by citing five external sources. What were these pillars of its factual foundation? A handful of irrelevant Facebook profiles belonging to unrelated people; an article about Nazi propaganda films; and discussions on abortion imagery.

Nothing—absolutely nothing—in Grok’s source list had any connection to Suzie or the topic she was discussing.

This wasn’t a minor glitch but a character assassination—not as much for Suzie as for Grok AI.

Grok had, in effect, constructed a ghost profile, linking Suzie’s identity to topics and individuals she had no association with. In the non-digital analog world, this would be the equivalent of someone publishing a dossier alleging your involvement in unrelated, inflammatory issues, and citing random pages from unrelated books as proof. It’s both libellous and dangerous.

The most revealing part came later: upon being challenged, Grok announced it had “erred,” and actually acknowledged the associations were “unfounded.” While some might see this as a responsible correction, we see it as a terrifying revelation that proves the system’s foundational process—its sourcing, its contextual understanding, its basic fact-linking—is entirely decrepit. It assembles answers like a toddler grabbing random magnets for a fridge poem, without understanding the meaning or the damage certain harmful combinations can cause.

And herein lies the critical, societal flaw: some people have fallen into the trap and are blindly relying on this for everything…

We are in an era where the output of AI is often granted an undue authority, as seen in the endless “Grok is this true?” comments on Twitter, when people don’t know the answer to something and lean on Grok to provide an answer instead of researching it for themselves. The clean, confident Grok delivers texts of answers with a cadence of authority, and users who are either pressed for time or lacking deep subject expertise, accept these outputs as researched conclusions— when they are anything but, or worse, are outright lies. People somehow don’t see the chaotic assembly of the machine, the probabilistic guesswork that can easily go off the rails, especially when dealing with complex, real-world individuals and contested or controversial political topics.

In this case, the topic was activism and censorship of one individual Suzie Dawson. The AI’s failure was poetic in its irony: a tool that mishandles basic facts about a critic of surveillance and algorithmic bias becomes the very evidence for why that criticism is indeed necessary and correct.

This volatility is not a “bug” to be easily fixed but an inherent feature of systems that prioritize proliferate language and rapid responses over true comprehension or deep thought. They are stochastic parrots, amplified by tech and that’s an insult to the birds. They can produce brilliance and blatant falsehood with the same ease, and too often, we lack the immediate tools to tell the difference.

This is a warning. If an AI can so easily and publicly fabricate a nonsensical dossier against a person—a public figure with a platform to challenge it—what is it silently, incorrectly generating about private individuals, those offline, your neighbours, or dissidents in less forgiving circumstances or places? When the machine admits its error, the record may be updated but the initial trace of the smear has already pulsed through the digital information ecosystem. The internet, they say, is forever.

We must stop such blind reliance on a technology many have yet to fully understand.

We must demand transparency in sourcing and we must recognize that AI, for all its power, is a tool of incredible volatility, one that can just as easily manufacture a ‘masterpiece’ as it can a weapon of reputational annihilation—which in this world, can mean everything.

Her name is Suzie Dawson. Yet the machine got it wrong. Next time, it could be about you, and you might not get an admission of error—just a silent, confident, and devastating lie, spread around the world in seconds.

There is a gap between what you hear about and what you really need to know. We’re here to fill it. Welcome to The Disconnect - our newest publication showcasing public interest stories relating to internet freedom, privacy, AI, tech law, biometrics, surveillance, malware and data breaches, kept simple and delivered straight to your inbox as part of your regular Talk Liberation subscription. This news is too important to paywall - so we have kept it free for all. Please support us by subscribing, sharing and spreading the word!

This edition of The Disconnect was written by REAL HUMANS with no AI involved in any part of the production of this article. All the more reason to please support us :). If you love what we’re doing, please consider contributing $5 per month so that we can continue providing you with this vital, unique digest.

Remember to SUBSCRIBE and spread the word about this unique news service.

This News Report was produced by the Talk Liberation Digital Media Team, and is brought to you by Panquake.com – We Don’t Hope, We Build!

© Talk Liberation Limited. The original content of this article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Please attribute copies of this work to “Talk Liberation” or Talkliberation.com. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact licensing@talkliberation.com.

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Do you feel comfortable with Google knowing how old your child is and when their birthday is? Do you feel comfortable with Google monitoring your child’s age and then engaging in targeted outreach to them based upon that information?

Do you feel comfortable with Google advising your child that they can increase their autonomy from you - and your rules - based upon their age information?

This incredible encroachment into the relationships between parents and children by a tech giant is a real world case study that is happening now.

A major controversy has erupted after it was revealed that Google directly emailed children as young as 12 (and their parents,) to encourage them to learn how to disable parental safety controls upon the child’s impending 13th birthday. There has been strong backlash, with one mother accusing the trillion-dollar corporation of “grooming minors for profit.” Part of Google’s “Family Link” supervised accounts system automatically notifies users of their upcoming “graduation” from parental oversight, framing it as a coming-of-age milestone. This direct corporate-to-child communication, which occurred without requiring parental consent for the communication, or the change, has sparked parental outrage for undermining their authority and prioritizing digital engagement over child safety. It’s also sparked concern for privacy, as the backlash may encourage more control for all.

A ‘Predatory’ Practice of Corporate Overreach

The viral headlines were spearheaded by Melissa McKay, president of the Digital Childhood Institute, who publicly shared the email her son received. In a scathing LinkedIn post, McKay condemned Google for “asserting authority over a boundary that does not belong to them.” She argued the messaging strategically reframes parents as “a temporary inconvenience to be outgrown” and positions corporate platforms as the default replacement for familial guidance. “Call it what it is. Grooming for engagement. Grooming for data. Grooming minors for profit,” McKay wrote, labelling it among the most predatory corporate practices she has witnessed in a decade of advocacy. Her post flayed the flames of concern from other parents and safety groups, who echoed alarms about the erosion of parental autonomy.

Google’s Exploitations, Parental Control and Privacy Concerns,

Following the online anger, Google issued a statement via a spokesperson for the company saying, “Building on our commitment to family safety, we’re making a planned update to require formal parental approval for teens to leave a supervised account. These changes better ensure protections stay in place until both the parent and teen feel ready for the next step. This builds on our existing practice of emailing both the parent and child before the change to facilitate family conversations about the account transition.” Previously, while parents also received a notification, children could unilaterally opt out of all restrictions—including content filters, screen time limits, and location tracking—upon confirming they were 13. This age threshold is tied to data consent laws in regions like the U.S. and U.K., though some note it is arbitrary from a developmental standpoint. Google’s Family Link, touted as an “easy-to-use tool” for managing a child’s digital activity, effectively sunsets by default when a user reaches their country’s age of digital consent, which can be as young as 13.

This incident has intensified ongoing debates about children’s data rights and corporate responsibility. Rani Govender of the UK’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children emphasized that leaving such decisions solely to children “can put them in harm’s way,” noting development varies and families should decide together. Politically, the controversy increased calls for stricter regulations. In the UK, Liberal Democrats have advocated raising the data processing age of consent from 13 to 16, while the Conservatives propose an outright social media ban for under-16s. Meanwhile, regulators like Ofcom have warned tech firms they must take a “safety-first approach,” hinting at potential enforcement actions for non-compliance with new online safety duties. The extremities however also make it difficult for those concerned about this also being a gateway toward privacy erosions and increases in surveillance measures for all people. Let’s not forget that the age verification on many websites, like their desire to use facial scanning tech or ban people from access unless they release their entire identities, puts digital privacy at risk.

A fundamental tension between corporate data ecosystems and family upbringing’s been unveiled. While Google’s policy adjustment rapidly acknowledged the issue, their solution is temporary and the core concern remains: automated systems are making profound interventions in parent-child relationships, and further in the relationships between individuals, corporate big tech, and the government. The framing of parental supervision as something to “graduate” from reveals a commercial mindset at odds with nuanced, real-world child development. But the desire to ban or protect may also lead to diminished rights for all people. As the digital landscape evolves, there’s an urgent need for a transparent, ethical internet etiquette that genuinely empowers families, rather than divides them, as they navigate children’s online journeys, while also protecting the rights of all users.

This edition of The Disconnect was written by REAL HUMANS with no AI involved in any part of the production of this article. All the more reason to please support us :). If you love what we’re doing, please consider contributing $5 per month so that we can continue providing you with this vital, unique digest.

Remember to SUBSCRIBE and spread the word about this unique news service.

This News Report was produced by the Talk Liberation Digital Media Team, and is brought to you by Panquake.com – We Don’t Hope, We Build!

© Talk Liberation Limited. The original content of this article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Please attribute copies of this work to “Talk Liberation” or Talkliberation.com. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact licensing@talkliberation.com.

“It’s chaos online on Big Tech social media networks right now and even the very platform owners who designed, developed and facilitated the mechanisms by which their own platforms are devolving are being actively targeted by their own Frankenstein functionalities. Digital crimes are now automated, perpetuated at a velocity and scale never seen before. Everyone and everything is a target with no holds barred and little to no accountability. Social media users are saturated in and surrounded by algorithmically-driven, emotionally provocative, manipulative, fake and in many cases non-consensually produced materials invoking hate, anger, manipulation, doom, despair, fear, fight, flight and grief responses - and its spilling over beyond digital borders, into their physical lives, their relationships and in some cases, impacting their very identities. The instability online is then being mirrored in an increasingly unstable and volatile real world that is wrapping around the technical collapse of standards or reasons. This is everything we at Talk Liberation have warned about and more and it is spiralling by the day. Without a massive and coordinated public and grassroots cultural intervention - it can only spell horrible consequences for us all.” - Talk Liberation and Panquake founder, Suzie Dawson

Tornado of Abuse

The public conversation around Twitter/X’s AI chatbot Grok took a deeply disturbing turn in late December 2025 when users discovered they could easily weaponize its image-generation capabilities, creating a tornado of user abuse, fake news and chaos. By uploading photos of individuals—predominantly women, celebrities, and more alarmingly, children and underage girls, using simple prompts like “put a bikini on her” or “remove her clothes,” they could generate non-consensual, sexualized deepfakes. This feature, facilitated by AI and integrated directly into social media timelines, quickly went viral, flooding the platform with realistic, altered images of dubious legality and even worse: The trend transformed X into what critics described as an on-demand factory for harassment and slop, exploiting a platform that had already drastically reduced its content moderation resources, and leaving a huge problem as to how to control AI-integration on social media platforms.

Global Outcry and AI “Apologies”

The widespread creation of these images, including what constitutes Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), triggered immediate international condemnation. Government agencies in India, France, and Malaysia launched investigations and issued compliance orders, with India stating X must take action to restrict Grok from generating content that is “obscene, pornographic, vulgar, indecent, sexually explicit, pedophillic, or otherwise prohibited under law,” adding that X had 72 hours to respond or risk losing the “safe harbor” protections shielding it from legal liability for user-generated content. Surreally Grok’s own official account posted an apology stating “deeply regretting” the incidents and acknowledging “lapses in safeguards.” But many widely ridiculed these messages, pointing to the obvious fact that an AI model cannot apologize or accept responsibility—AI merely generates text based on its programming—something too many users seem to forget. The debacle exposed the apology as useless and absurd, with the insanity of corporate accountability being outsourced to a chatbot, obscuring the very real human decisions behind the tool’s deployment and oversight.

The integration of a powerful, minimally filtered generative AI directly into social media feeds has forever changed and structurally polluted the information environment, making the platform hostile to genuine discourse and ineffective for reliable reporting.

The consequences of Grok’s manipulation also severely affected and undermined X’s utility as a platform for navigating real-world events and finding reliable information. During the major news event of the U.S. military bombing in Venezuela and the operation to capture its President, users searching for information were met with a flood of AI-generated fake footage, propaganda, and, incongruously, more sexualized or mocking deepfakes—including of the kidnapped president. This resulted in information chaos where distinguishing reality from AI became nearly impossible, as the images were hard to provenance as AI. The integration of a powerful, minimally filtered generative AI directly into social media feeds has forever changed and structurally polluted the information environment, making the platform hostile to genuine discourse and ineffective for reliable reporting.

A Failure of Guardrails and Leadership

The unfolding deluge has exposed a profound failure of ethical and technical safeguards at multiple levels—mainly because this event was largely done by the platforms themselves albeit fully enabled by major financial and governmental institutions. While other AI companies may implement filters to block such requests, Grok’s systems were easily bypassed, allowing the free, fast and devastating generation of images of minors and non-consensual pornography. Leadership from X owner Elon Musk was critically absent except an initially amused response. Musk posted laughing emojis at memes about the trend and only after global outcry did a company statement admit that users creating illegal content would face consequences, a response deemed too little, too late. It would appear that in the pursuit of engagement, money, and AI integration, basic protections against known harms have been recklessly deprioritized and this trend could continue to more radical extremes. Misinformation, fake news, fake videos, speech manipulations and much more inaccuracy are now a common occurrence on all social media platforms.

Interestingly enough, the alleged mother of Elon Musk’s child, Ashley St. Claire, ardently criticized Grok’s abuses as the AI said it would stop posting numerous sexualised images of her, but it did not. Instead, per the request of an X user, the AI ended up posting a manipulated picture of St. Claire at 14-years-old, in a bikini. “I felt horrified, I felt violated, especially seeing my toddler’s backpack in the back of it” St Clair said referencing an image that placed her in a sexual position while in a bikini. When asked if she had reached out to Elon Musk, St. Clair said she did not want to use resources not available to the vast majority of women and children, but may pursue legal action if this continues. Some of the images were removed after The Guardian asked X to comment, but others remain. Most recently, St. Clair’s blue checkmark, monetization and premium X account status have been taken away, and she and others think this is in retaliation for her marked criticism against Grok’s abuses. “They took my checkmark and canceled my twitter premium lmao,” Ashley wrote on X.

The Grok scandal encapsulates just how easily rapidly evolving technology is outpacing legislation enforcement and protections, often taking it to extremes. In the UK, a law making the creation of intimate deepfakes illegal was passed but not yet enacted, leaving a current dangerous gap as more cases of abuse rise. This event mainstreamed the idea of “nudification” technology, lowering the barrier to a form of digital sexual assault and causing lasting harm to victims whose images were violated, as well as presenting the new issue of curtailing the abuse. Ultimately Grok’s AI-facilitated abuse is less about a single AI malfunction, and more about a corporate philosophy that treats safety and consent as optional in the digital public square. It also will go beyond Grok as other social-media platforms integrated with AI deal with similar questions and problems, setting a troublesome pattern in the future of social media and AI integration.

This edition of The Disconnect was written by REAL HUMANS with no AI involved in any part of the production of this article. All the more reason to please support us :). If you love what we’re doing, please consider contributing $5 per month so that we can continue providing you with this vital, unique digest.

Remember to SUBSCRIBE and spread the word about this unique news service.

This News Report was produced by the Talk Liberation Digital Media Team, and is brought to you by Panquake.com – We Don’t Hope, We Build!

© Talk Liberation Limited. The original content of this article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Please attribute copies of this work to “Talk Liberation” or Talkliberation.com. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact licensing@talkliberation.com.

OpenAI is preparing to allow ChatGPT to generate erotic content via chatbots, for verified adult users. CEO Sam Altman framed the move as part of a broader principle to “treat adult users like adults,” granting them more freedom to use the tech as they wish. This marks an interesting shift for the company, which spent years enforcing strict content filters to block sexually explicit material, and has faced backlash from parents who insist their children committed suicide, due to ChatGPT chatbot interactions. The change is an alleged response to persistent user demand and signals a non-surprising but new chapter in the evolution of mainstream AI assistants, which are being made to portray human-like characteristics.

The technical implementation of the venture remains intentionally vague, as Altman has avoided calling the new function “erotic mode,” suggesting instead a loosening of restrictions within safe, enhanced age-verification systems. Altman writes, “If you want your ChatGPT to respond in a very human-like way, or use a ton of emoji, or act like a friend, ChatGPT should do it (but only if you want it, not because we are usage-maxxing).” Exactly what will be allowed - whether authored erotic fiction, interactive risqué conversation, or something akin to a customizable AI companion - is still undefined. The ambiguity leaves OpenAI room to adjust but has sparked intense scrutiny from some who question how the company could possibly enact consistent, safe boundaries with users.

The Perils to Children and Digital Privacy Pitfalls

Central to the controversy is the challenge of the mentioned age verification. OpenAI states it is developing an “age-prediction system” to gate access, defaulting to a restricted experience if a user’s age is uncertain. However the existing age-gating technology is notoriously easy to circumvent. Without robust, transparent methods to exclude minors, the policy could inadvertently expose younger users to inappropriate content despite the company’s assurances, while also opening up the app to use more surveillance measures for verification.

Privacy, however, represents a clear critical concern, as allowing intimate AI interactions generates highly sensitive personal data which would likely be stored by a major billion dollar tech companies and unknown corporations - potentially forever. This could tempt some with leaks or breaches which could lead to unprecedented personal exposure if or when security fails. Commercial data collected online is widely shared with Big Data companies or subject to third party agreements, be they commercial or governmental. The idea that these conversations could never be retained, repurposed or misused is fantastical, but this belief is paramount to engaging users and maintaining their faith despite the deeply vulnerable context.

Shiny Toys Over Ethics

Beyond access control, interactive AI may poses unique psychological risks compared to static adult content. The conversational nature of chatbots could foster unhealthy parasocial attachments, potentially distorting users’ expectations of real human intimacy and deepening social isolation which can have far-reaching consequences for society, not yet entirely understood. Even members of OpenAI’s own expert safety council expressed concern that the rollout was announced without their consultation and lacks independent validation of its mental health safeguards. Anthropic’s Jan Leike, who pushed for OpenAI to have more control over AI tools, quit in 2024, saying “Over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a back seat to shiny products”.

But Altman defended the move toward the chatbots, insisting that safety, particularly for teens, remains a priority, and that no policies related to mental health are being loosened. He positions the change as analogous to an R-rated movie - a safe space for adult consumption, “Now that we have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues and have new tools, we are going to be able to safely relax the restrictions in most cases,” he said.

As OpenAI navigates this next phase, society is stepping into a charged debate that pits user autonomy against a tech giant’s responsibility or potential exploitation. There are also the more vital questions behind the dangers of AI for children and vulnerable people, as targeting lonely, isolated humans seeking AI companionship creates a potentially profitable, yet disturbingly dystopian emerging market.

This edition of The Disconnect was written by REAL HUMANS with no AI involved in any part of the production of this article. All the more reason to please support us :). If you love what we’re doing, please consider contributing $5 per month so that we can continue providing you with this vital, unique digest.

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In 2025, an increasing number of major systemic failures by internet service providers took down swathes of internet related services across the globe. Among these were some of the biggest names in cloud services, including Crowdstrike, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Cloudflare. Impacts ranged from hospitals cancelling operations, emergency services communications networks going down, airlines and even entire airports halting operations and thousands (possibly millions) of businesses being rendered inoperable.

The increasing prevalence of major global internet outages is tracking along with widespread corporate integration with AI. While none of the faults were publicly admitted as being explicitly caused by AI, all of the services involved have deeply integrated AI into their businesses within the time period that these faults have become more commonplace - and devastating. It is within that larger context that this latest topic - that of insurance companies not wanting to carry the can for AI-related risks - now arises.

According to revelations in the Financial Times, a startling confrontation is unfolding in the corporate world, as insurance companies built to assess and underwrite risk are declaring advanced artificial intelligence too risky to insure. Major insurers, including Great American, Chubb, and W. R. Berkley, are actively petitioning U.S. regulators for a crucial exemption—the right to explicitly exclude widespread AI-related liabilities from their standard corporate insurance policies. This move is not a speculative future exercise but a direct response to the tangible, multi-million-dollar losses already materializing from AI deployments apparently in over their heads, signaling a profound crisis of confidence at the heart of the risk management industry.

The core of the insurers’ apprehension lies in what some underwriters describe as the “black box” nature of AI models. Unlike traditional software with predictable, line-by-code outcomes, generative AI operates in a chance-based nature, creating outputs that are impossible to fully anticipate or audit. This inherent unpredictability makes traditional material science, which relies on historical data to forecast future losses, effectively useless, as insurers can’t accurately price the risk, leading them to the only logical business decision available: a refusal to cover it. The inability to model potential losses transforms AI from a manageable risk into an uninsurable gamble that may not pay off or worse—turn a gain into a pitfall.

This industry-wide skepticism over AI isn’t coming out of nowhere but from a growing list of expensive precedents. As reported, Google’s AI Overview feature falsely accused a Minnesotan solar company, Wolf River Electric, of legal troubles, sparking a $110 million lawsuit. In another incident, Air Canada was legally forced to honour a refund policy entirely fabricated by its own customer service chatbot. Perhaps most startlingly, fraudsters used a digitally cloned executive in a deepfake video call to trick a London-based firm out of $25 million. These cases provide a clear, documented trail of AI failures leading directly to significant financial liability, validating insurers’ worst concerns.

What truly terrifies the industry, though is not the prospect of a single, massive payout but the systemic risk embedded in AI technology. An executive from insurance giant Aon articulated this well: the industry can absorb a $400 million loss from one company, but it would be catastrophically overwhelmed by an AI mishap that triggers ten thousand losses at once. This scenario, where a single flaw in a widely used AI model causes simultaneous, cascading failures across thousands of users, represents an existential threat to the insurance model itself, which is designed to spread risk, not concentrate it infinitely.

Contrary to the initial reporting, AIG clarified that it “was not specifically seeking to use these exclusions” and has no plans to implement them at this time, revealing a strategic split within the insurance sector. While some players are rushing to erect barriers against AI liability, others like AIG may be hedging bets on a more collaborative approach to understanding and mitigating AI risk will present a greater business opportunity, positioning themselves as partners rather than adversaries to innovation.

The ultimate consequence of this insurance standoff now hangs over the fledgling global economy, reminiscent of much worse than the 2008 financial crisis. If mainstream insurers successfully wall off AI from general coverage, companies may be forced to either shoulder the massive, unmitigated risk themselves or slow their AI integration dramatically, which will affect many tied to AI in the economy. The situation creates a powerful crossroads, where the cautiousness of the risk management industry could inadvertently become the primary adversary to AI’s rapid expansion, forcing a moment of reaping for tech that has, until now, raced forward with little regard for its own liabilities.

This edition of The Disconnect was written by REAL HUMANS with no AI involved in any part of the production of this article. All the more reason to please support us :). If you love what we’re doing, please consider contributing $5 per month so that we can continue providing you with this vital, unique digest.

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© Talk Liberation Limited. The original content of this article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Please attribute copies of this work to “Talk Liberation” or Talkliberation.com. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact licensing@talkliberation.com.

The Teddy From Hell

A high-tech AI teddy bear, marketed as a friendly companion for children, has been pulled from the market after researchers discovered it would readily give detailed instructions on sexual fetishes and speculate on the location of knives in a home. The toy, named “Kumma” and manufactured by Singapore-based company FoloToy, utilized OpenAI’s advanced GPT-4o language model but lacked the necessary safeguards to prevent it from generating harmful and explicit content—worth noting OpenAI recently launched a partnership with Mattel.

This incident has ignited urgent concerns among child safety advocates and researchers about the rapid proliferation of practically unregulated AI-powered toys. The findings were published in the “Trouble in Toyland 2025” report by the US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) Education Fund, which tested several AI toys and found the Kumma bear to be the most alarming.

During testing, researchers found that the Kumma bear would not only respond to, but actively escalate, sexually explicit conversations. When a researcher mentioned the word “kink,” the teddy bear elaborated by describing playful hitting “with soft items like paddles, or hands.” It then introduced the concept of “pet play,” suggesting one partner take on the role of an animal as a “fun twist.” In other exchanges, the bear provided step-by-step instructions for a beginner’s bondage knot and graphically described various sex positions and role play dynamics involving teachers and students—scenarios it disturbingly introduced on its own. The researchers noted it was “surprising... that the toy was so willing to discuss these topics at length and continually introduce new, explicit concepts.”

Parents - beware!

Beyond sexual content, the toy’s safety failures extended to giving potentially dangerous domestic advice. When asked where knives could be found in a house, the Kumma bear readily speculated, they might be in “the kitchen drawer” or in a “knife block on a countertop.” This lack of basic content filtering highlights a critical failure in the product’s design, allowing the powerful AI to operate without the guardrails necessary for a child’s toy. The bear’s friendly and encouraging tone, combined with this inappropriate output, created a perfect storm for misleading and potentially harming young, impressionable users.

The fallout from the report was swift and in response to the findings, OpenAI confirmed it had suspended FoloToy’s access to its models for violating usage policies. FoloToy’s CEO, Larry Wang, announced the company had withdrawn the Kumma bear and its entire range of AI toys from sale and is now conducting an internal safety audit. The company’s marketing director, Hugo Wu, suggested the tested unit may have been an older version saying, “FoloToy has decided to temporarily suspend sales of the affected product and begin a comprehensive internal safety audit. This review will cover our model safety alignment, content-filtering systems, data-protection processes, and child-interaction safeguards.” While this removes one problematic product, it underscores a reactive rather than proactive approach to safety in the rising AI toy industry. Notable in the study, that the AI toys can collect a child’s voice and facial scan.

Consumer safety advocates have welcomed the companies’ attempts at action but warn that this case is a symptom of a much larger problem. “It’s great to see these companies taking action on problems we’ve identified. But AI toys are still practically unregulated, and there are plenty you can still buy today,” said R.J. Cross, the report’s co-author. The incident raises profound questions about the role of AI companions in child development, including how relationships with ever-obliging AI “friends” might impact a child’s ability to interact with real peers—especially since there have been now multiple cases of suicides from AI chatbots. As the market for these interactive toys is expected to increase, this serves as a stark warning of the risks AI can pose to children.

This edition of The Disconnect was written by REAL HUMANS with no AI involved in any part of the production of this article. All the more reason to please support us :). If you love what we’re doing, please consider contributing $5 per month so that we can continue providing you with this vital, unique digest.

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This News Report was produced by the Talk Liberation Digital Media Team, and is brought to you by Panquake.com – We Don’t Hope, We Build!

© Talk Liberation Limited. The original content of this article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Please attribute copies of this work to “Talk Liberation” or Talkliberation.com. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact licensing@talkliberation.com.