Elon Musk has accused the UK of attempting to censor free speech, after the government said it would support the media regulator if it decided to ban X’s services in the country.
The owner of X reposted a user who questioned why other AI platforms with similar features do not face similar scrutiny. Musk wrote that national authorities “just want to censor free speech.”
Musk has been attacking the UK in a flurry of X posts overnight. It comes as the UK’s technology secretary Liz Kendall said on Friday that “sexually manipulating images of women and children is despicable and abhorrent”. She added that the regulator Ofcom would have the government’s “full support” if it decided to ban X over the growing scandal of AI assistant Grok creating sexualised images of women and children.
The social media platform’s integrated AI assistant Grok has been used to create sexualised images of women and underage minors. Children’s rights NGO Internet Watch Foundation told Euractiv it had found sexualised images featuring children between the ages of 11 and 13.
Grok posted on X that the sexualised output was due to a lapse in safeguards in its AI system. X has subsequently limited image-generation to paying users only, a move that the UK government has criticised. “It is an insult and totally unacceptable for Grok to still allow this if you’re willing to pay for it,” Kendall said.
Lawmakers in the EU have also reacted to the scandal, calling for a tougher EU crackdown. The European Commission called the service illegal. The EU executive has asked X to retain its internal records under the EU’s content moderation rules, the Digital Services Act.
(ow)