Claire Boucher—who performs and creates under her stage name Grimes, but prefers her birth name or just "C" offstage—recently returned to her musical persona's social media accounts after taking a hiatus for her own well-being.
Once extremely active, she noted on X in April:
"I've been way more offline lately, tried all the apps for a bit yesterday and man! It's rly dark on here!"
"I think it's very unhealthy to be on social media, it feels like a ghost town of depression, bitterness and pictures of beautiful women doing [sexy] things."
"I feel like this is a massive moral failure of all the apps. And it's causing great harm to society."
Her high level of activity—posting on X a dozen times on May 7 alone—continued for most of April and the first week of May, but then fell off dramatically, ending with only a few posts for the rest of May and the entire month of June. The Canadian musician and artist dropped in occasionally to share performance scheduling news or to promote a book.
During one brief stay on X in June, she finished up by stating:
"I must go back offline for cognitive security reasons."
"I will be back when the art is ready, but I will be bringing the cognitive security agents with me to clean this place up."
Boucher checked in again on July 7 and had a much harsher assessment for the platform owned by her on again, off again partner Elon Musk. The two share three of Musk's 14 children: 5-year-old X Æ A-Xii, 3 1/2-year-old Exa Dark Sideræl, and 3-year-old Techno Mechanicus.
She wrote:
"Ok I've basically been entirely off social media and returning here it is overwhelmingly abundantly and profoundly clear that this place - and all of these places - are a poison - a prison of utterly short form deep sounding nonsense attached to no one that ur brain will discard imaging its learning."
"The entire thing is a theatre. A sh*tty pale simulacra of a life."
People saw no lie in her assessment of the state of X under Musk's management even if they weren't sympathetic.
@AspexPhoto/X
@Jesusarmy/X
Boucher didn't elaborate on what specifically—if anything—prompted her post.
But she has been a very vocal proponent of AI as a tool for advancement. Her post calling out X came as Musk was under fire for having his employees manipulate the programming of X's generative artificial intelligence chatbot Grok to be more antisemitic.
Musk had previously garnered criticism for having his programmers make Grok push misinformation about a non-existent white genocide in South Africa.
Such manipulations negate the purpose and validity of generative AI, a type that learns from its environment and creates new content—text, images, audio, video—based on user prompts.
For example, search engine AI analyzes and categorizes existing data and reports its findings to the user. Generative AI models learn from vast amounts of data to "generate novel outputs."
Inserting biases or misinformation to promote a specific agenda, as Musk has done repeatedly, corrupts this process.
Boucher has aired disagreements with Musk on X before.
Musk suddenly began bringing their oldest child with him—on his shoulders—to all public appearances in the aftermath of the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. It was a move that prompted many to label her son Musk's "human shield"—especially given his history of neglecting, ignoring, abandoning, or disowning his other 13 children.
Boucher shared her dismay over the move on X, posting:
"He should not be in public like this. I have tried begging the public and my kid's dad to keep them offline, and I've tried legal recourse."
"The state of my children's lives being public is of grave concern to me and I think about how to solve this every day. It's insane to me that there's no way to deal with this."
"I would hope there was some law that would allow a parent to veto small children from living public lives but I don't even trust the law to help me now if I tried to invoke it [to be honest]."
After it became clear the murder was an isolated incident and not an indication of an open season on financially-bloated CEOs, Musk's constant companion was dropped like his 13 other siblings.
@jaketapoer/Bluesky
@BillAckman/Twitter