Keir Starmer last night warned Elon Musk to shut down an AI tool allowing users to create ‘disgusting’ images on his social media site, saying: ‘If X cannot control Grok, we will.’
Addressing Labour MPs, the Prime Minister said he was determined to act ‘fast’ to prevent the AI chatbot Grok from being used to ‘undress’ images of women and children.
Earlier, the Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said she was bringing forward regulations this week to tighten the law on so-called ‘digital stripping’.
Ministers have been locked in a stand-off with X for days over the use of Grok to create sexualised images of real people, including removing the clothes of women and children and putting them in bikinis.
The social media site responded last week by limiting the function to paying subscribers, arguing that the details of anyone using the tool to create abusive images would then be available.
But Ms Kendall said the change amounted to ‘monetising abuse’ and called for a total ban.
Media regulator Ofcom, which has powers to levy fines running into billions of pounds, yesterday launched an investigation into whether the social media site has broken the law.
The spat risks reopening Labour’s bitter row with the world’s richest man, who has argued that the use of Grok is a ‘free speech’ issue and accused the Government of ‘fascism’.
Ministers have been locked in a stand-off with X for days over the use of Grok to create sexualised images of real people, including removing the clothes of women and children and putting them in bikinis
He also posted his own picture of the Prime Minister in a bikini.
It could trigger a wider row with members of the Trump administration in America who have already raised concerns about free speech in the UK.
The Prime Minister told a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party: ‘The actions of Grok and X are absolutely disgusting and shameful.
Protecting their abusive users, rather than the women and children who are being abused, shows a total distortion of priorities.
‘So let me be crystal clear, we won’t stand for it. If X cannot control Grok, we will – and we will do it fast because if you profit from harm and abuse, you lose the right to self-regulate.’
Some Labour MPs have urged the Government to quit X in protest.
But Ms Kendall said that the Government was not currently planning to leave a site which is used by a quarter of its 19million UK users as their main source of news.
‘Our views, and often simply the facts, need to be heard wherever possible,’ she added.
Elon Musk (pictured) has argued that the use of Grok is a ‘free speech’ issue and accused the Government of ‘fascism’
Ms Kendall said ‘all options are on the table’ if X refuses to comply.
But Government sources have played down the prospect of a total ban on the website.
Privately, ministers believe Mr Musk will be forced to act because of a worldwide backlash, including in the US.
Some of the pictures generated by Grok were ‘not harmless images’, Ms Kendall said, adding: ‘They are weapons of abuse, disproportionately aimed at women and girls, and they are illegal.’
The Technology Secretary said that she was tightening the law by bringing in regulations making it an offence to ask artificial intelligence to generate ‘non-consensual intimate images’.
So-called ‘nudification’ apps are also being banned.
Conservative technology spokesman Julia Lopez said Ofcom was right to act against illegal material online.
However, she warned that ministers should also do more to protect women and girls in the real world as well as on the internet.
She hammered home her point by referring to what she described as Labour’s ‘failure to advance the rape gang inquiry, its failure to stop puberty-blocking trials, its failure to implement single-sex spaces, its inability to deport illegal migrants who have committed sex offences’.
Ms Lopez added that banning X would be an ‘extraordinarily serious move against a platform that can be used for good’.
