Key Insights
- Potential Ban: X may face a ban in the UK due to unethical AI use.
- Government Response: UK ministers are considering blocking X entirely.
- AI Tool Limitations: X announced that the Grok AI tool will be restricted to paying users.
- Public Backlash: There is significant public and governmental pressure on X to address these issues.
X could potentially be banned in the United Kingdom following unethical use of AI through Elon Musk‘s chatbot Grok, which is thoroughly integrated with the original social media platform. The AI tool has been used to generate non-consensual sexualized images of women and minors. Now, UK ministers are saying that they will take action, possibly blocking X altogether.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer responded, telling Greatest Hits Radio: “It’s unlawful. We’re not going to tolerate it. I’ve asked for all options to be on the table. It’s disgusting. X needs to get their act together and get this material down.” Starmer stated that Ofcom (the Office of Communications) has the “full support [of the government] to take action” against the platform formerly known as Twitter.
In the wake of this backlash, X announced on Friday that the Grok AI images tool would be limited to paying users only, rather than being available through the free version. The same day, Downing Street said in a statement that this “simply turns an AI feature that allows the creation of unlawful images into a premium service.” Grok’s acknowledgment of the deepfakes can be seen in the repost below:
“It is time for X to grip this issue, if another media company had billboards in town centres showing unlawful images, it would act immediately to take them down or face public backlash,“ the prime minister’s spokesperson also said. Other UK officials who spoke out on the issue include minister Anna Turley, who said that “conversations are taking place” about the Labour party leaving X.
Hannah Swirsky, head of policy at the Internet Watch Foundation, also said of the tool being limited to paid subscribers: “We do not believe it is good enough to simply limit access to a tool which should never have had the capacity to create the kind of imagery we have seen in recent days.” The IWF previously reported that Grok had been used to generate “criminal imagery of children aged between 11 and 13.“
While the Grok X account has said that “AI has safeguards, but improvements are ongoing to block such requests entirely,” it is presently only redirecting such requests to the option to pay for X premium. Amid rising concerns about AI across industries, Elon Musk has been a key figure in its development. TIME Magazine named “the architects of AI” as its “person of the year,” referring to multiple people, including Musk.
This year has seen several major leaps forward in AI in entertainment, which has largely left the industry extremely worried, including an AI “actress” being introduced and Disney investing $1 billion in OpenAI, allowing its IP to be used in user-prompted, AI-generated content. The primary concerns here, however, have to do with job displacement and copyright infringement.
The UK government may be pursuing a ban on X on the basis of these images being akin to sexual violence, while individuals and groups are considering leaving the platform in the meantime. X continues to be a hotbed of controversy, pushing technology and business forward to increasingly unethical ends.
