Amid the global gore and Greenlandization of our current moment, fears about the image generator known as Grok offered by Elon Musk’s X might seem genuinely gratuitous.

But the Toronto Globe and Mail got it right in a January 17 editorial when it called the recent offering from Musk’s social media company a real and pervasive social harm that calls into question the very justification for social media.

No, the X bot that permits users to easily create and distribute deep fake images of people – most often women – in various stages of undress or humiliating postures, doesn’t immediately compare to the geopolitical mayhem of President Trump’s Napoleonic fantasy about occupying and owning Greenland. It isn’t on the same scale as mass murders in Ukraine or Iran.

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But as the Globe’s editorial board wrote: “Such images carry real harm. They harass and humiliate the people depicted and act to make social media an even more unwelcome place, especially for women.”

It noted some Grok-using degenerates requested the bot to generate “the body of Renee Nicole Macklin Good, the mother of three shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, in a bikini.”

Such despicable dehumanization is, as the Globe writers properly said, “vile.” 

Without denying the validity of that surface diagnosis, however, the editorial unfortunately offers a prescription that perpetuates the error it seeks to correct. It wants the State to step in with its two-tonne boots. It wants regulators and various bureaucratic buttinskis to peer over their glasses and issue edicts. It wants to take in hand decades of deep social disorder and hand it off to government for a quick fix.

Such a solution might work for a nano-second. Perhaps Evan Solomon, our federal minister of artificial intelligence and digital innovation, can artfully sell the mavens of social media on some short-term be-good behaviour. But the speed of Internet adaptation alone will doom every such measure to being outmoded before the ink dries on whatever decree is adopted.

What the Globe editorialists miss is that the damage done by Grok and its AI analogues is but a surface sign of an underlying void in moral understanding. They miss it precisely because their publication is primary among the forces, through their insatiable desire to be ideologically fashionable, have hollowed out the moral ground on which we as a society once stood strong and free.

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Evidence of their misunderstanding is obvious in their finger pointing at the “vile nature” of those who behave badly on social media, including using Grok for the foulest purposes. Well, actually, a properly grounded understanding would acknowledge that while the behaviour is “vile,” the bad actors’ nature is accurately called “fallen,” though redeemable through grace, not government. 

From a Catholic perspective, what’s needed isn’t a proliferation of pencil-pushers’ proclamations. It is penetration into the soul, much more than the State-sanctioned psyche, of the inviolable truth that God, Creator of all, commands us with the simple sentence to “love our neighbours as ourselves.” 

No one taught from earliest life to genuinely follow that commandment, and to cherish the grace it promises, could delude himself or herself that Internet anonymity will cloak the sin of degrading another human being, of exposing another person to vile public ridicule because of mere political difference. Everyone tempted to such sin will, on recognizing it, experience the restraining and correcting power of a restored, properly formed conscience.

It is conscience, after all, that is the fail-safe reminder that AI-generated images of the kind disseminated by Grok are not merely “fakes” but outright lies. They are crafted lies deliberately published to intentionally harm God’s children. They are, plainly speaking, mortal sins, two words The Catholic Register still uses despite their disappearance from the ideologically fashionable vocabularies of other newspaper editorialists.

It is the kind of plain-speaking that Pope Leo XIV has called for, most pointedly at a recent gathering of diplomats from some of the 184 countries represented at the Vatican.

"Today, the meaning of words is ever more fluid and the concepts they represent are increasingly ambiguous," the Holy Father said. "Language is no longer the preferred means by which human beings come to know and encounter one another."

Words, of course, are images in our minds, whether of gore in global conflicts or Donald Trump in a Napoleonic hat waving a wooden sword northward. Our words, our images must above all be governed by God if we are to stand strong and free. 

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