Elon Musk finally responded last week to widespread outrage about his social media platform X letting users create sexualised deepfakes with Grok, the platform’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot.

Musk has now assured the United Kingdom government he will block Grok from making deepfakes in order to comply with the law. But the change will likely only apply to users in the UK.

These latest complaints were hardly new, however. Last year, Grok users were able to “undress” posted pictures to produce images of women in underwear, swimwear or sexually suggestive positions. X’s “spicy” option let them to create topless images without any detailed prompting at all.

And such cases may be signs of things to come if governments aren’t more assertive about regulating AI.

Despite public outcry and growing scrutiny from regulatory bodies, X initially made little effort to address the issue and simply limited access to Grok on X to paying subscribers.

Various governments took action, with the UK announcing plans to legislate against deepfake tools, joining Denmark and Australia in seeking to criminalise such sexual material. UK regulator Ofcom launched an investigation of X, seemingly prompting Musk’s about-turn.

So far, the New Zealand government has been silent on the issue, even though domestic law is doing a poor job of preventing or criminalising non-consensual sexualised deepfakes.

The Harmful........

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