Sir Keir Starmer said during Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday that he “won’t back down” over Elon Musk’s creation of deepfakes by people using the AI tool Grok.
Musk has said that X will comply with UK safety laws and said they will make the AI image editing tool a premium service, Starmer said that this is 2horrific” and government ministers are “determined to take action.”
Emily Darlington, Labour MP for Milton Keynes Central, said, “If reports are correct, Elon Musk has climbed down today under pressure from this government.
“And let’s be clear, stripping women naked without consent in real life or online is abuse. But we don’t know whether to trust what X is saying today, and this isn’t just happening on X.”
Starmer responded, “The actions of Grok and X are disgusting and they’re shameful, and frankly, the decision to then turn this into a premium service is horrific, and we’re absolutely determined to take action here.
“We’ve made it clear that X has to act, but if not, Ofcom has our full backing and will introduce, and are introducing, legislation.
“I have been informed this morning that X is acting to ensure full compliance with UK law. If so, that is welcome, but we’re not going to back down. They must act.”
Following Starmer’s comments in the House of Commons Musk wrote on X, “I not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero.
Obviously, Grok does not spontaneously generate images, it does so only according to user requests. When asked to generate images, it will refuse to produce anything illegal, as the operating principle for Grok is to obey the laws of any given country or state.
“There may be times when adversarial hacking of Grok prompts does something unexpected. If that happens, we fix the bug immediately.”
The tech billionaire then wrote on X, “History will not be kind to Starmer.”
Reform’s head of policy Zia Yusuf warned that Starmer will now be “coming after your end-to-end encrypted messaging apps like Whatsapp and iMessage.
Starmer said it is “astonishing” Reform UK are defending Musk.
“I said the images are disgusting, their position is disgusting on this. This is weaponising images of women and children that should never be made.
However, Nigel Farage has condemned the images saying what is produced by Grok is “horrible in every way,” but to ban X will go against free speech.
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