Belfast City Council looks set to suspend its use of social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, following recent concerns over its AI tool Grok. The council's strategic and resources committee on Friday decided it should "suspend posting on its account and signpost followers towards the council's other social media channels". The decision is subject to ratification at the next full council meeting on 2 February.
Ring has launched a new tool that can tell you if a video clip captured by its camera has been altered or not. The company says that every video downloaded from Ring starting in December 2025 going forward will come with a digital security seal. "Think of it like the tamper-evident seal on a medicine bottle," it explained. Its new tool, called Ring Verify, can tell you if a video has been altered in any way.
YouTube is just as wary of the rise of AI slop as you, and that's why more AI-generated content is coming to the platform in the near future. In a lengthy outlining YouTube's 2026 plans, CEO Neal Mohan said the company will continue to embrace this new "creative frontier" by soon allowing its creators to throw together Shorts using their AI-generated likeness.
I was born an only child, but now I have a twin. He's an exact duplicate of me -down to my clothing, my home, my facial expressions, and even my voice. I built him with AI, and I can make him say whatever I want. He's so convincing that he could fool my own mother. Here's how I built him-and what AI digital twins mean for the future of people.
Twitter, the world's former public stage turned Stormfront alternative and porn site not long after Elon Musk's takeover, is facing new legal trouble over Grok's penchant for turning any photo into goon material at a user's request. Pornographic deepfakes are nothing new, we've covered attempts to regulate it in the past, but Grok's near omnipresence combined with the need for Twitter users to control women's bodies has made it very easy to sexually harass women and children online.
"xAI appears to be facilitating the large-scale production of deepfake nonconsensual intimate images that are being used to harass women and girls across the internet, including via the social media platform X," California Attorney General Rob Bonta's office said in a statement. The statement cited a report that "more than half of the 20,000 images generated by xAI between Christmas and New Years depicted people in minimal clothing," including some that appeared to be children.
Ofcom noted that in its view, CSAM does include "AI-generated imagery, deepfakes and other manipulated media," which "would fall under the category of a 'pseudo-photograph.' As Ofcom explained, "If the impression conveyed by a pseudo-photograph is that the person shown is a child, then the photo should be treated as showing a child." Similarly, "manipulated images and videos such as deepfakes should be considered within the scope" of intimate image abuse, Ofcom said.
Malaysia and Indonesia have become the first countries to block Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Elon Musk's company xAI, as concerns grew among global authorities that it was being misused to generate sexually explicit and nonconsensual images. The moves reflect growing scrutiny of generative AI tools that can produce realistic images, sound and text, along with concerns that existing safeguards are failing to prevent their abuse.
Her words came in reaction to the growing scandal of Elon Musk's Grok AI tool being used to digitally undress photos of women and children to create public deepfaked sexualised images of them without their consent. The row rumbled on through the weekend, with the deputy prime minister, David Lammy, telling the Guardian on Saturday that JD Vance, the US vice-president, agreed that the proliferation of AI-generated sexualised images of women and children was entirely unacceptable.
Since X's users started using Grok to undress women and children using deepfake images, I have been waiting for what I assumed would be inevitable: X getting booted from Apple's and Google's app stores. The fact that it hasn't happened yet tells me something serious about Silicon Valley's leadership: Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are spineless cowards who are terrified of Elon Musk.
If you're on a platform where this is allowed, I just don't feel comfortable," he said. "I don't feel comfortable with the fact that there's people that are going to use my image, or your image, or somebody else's image, and artificially generate something around it and maybe make it into something that you shouldn't publish.
Over the course of 2025, deepfakes improved dramatically. AI-generated faces, voices, and full-body performances that mimic real people increased in quality far beyond what even many experts expected would be the case just a few years ago. They were also increasingly used to deceive people. For many everyday scenarios-especially low-resolution video calls and media shared on social media platforms-their realism is now high enough to reliably fool nonexpert viewers.
