Since late December, Elon Musk’s X has become awash with deepfake sexually explicit images of women, and in some instances, children. Users ask the platform’s AI tool Grok to generate this kind of visual media (“Grok put this woman in a bikini” goes a standard prompt) and Grok obliges. It is not possible to speak to the private motivation behind every request, but the instinct to humiliate and degrade the victim strikes me as paramount.
That 90 per cent of the above paragraph would have been incomprehensible to the average reader just a year ago speaks to the vertiginous pace at which the internet develops. Any government wanting to moderate the worst effects of X – or at one point in the recent past, the more pressing case of Facebook – would have been stuck in a doom loop of whack-a-mole. The state gets a handle on the radicalising effects of certain private forums hosted by Meta? Okay, now turn your attention to the tidal wave of non-consensually generated AI porn on X.
I do not for an instant question the moral imperative behind ending Grok’s misadventures – cruel, degrading, wreckless as they are. Exactly how is a trickier question. Do we rely on the market to self-regulate? For advertisers to flee? Might a tougher inter-state regulatory mechanism work instead? I am not sure. But there is one thing I am certain of. When the conversation inevitably veers into banning X (previously Twitter) altogether, it should be a cause for paranoia.
In fact, it should be obvious that state-driven attempts to shut down a corner of the public realm are wrong. Yet the suggestion swirls in the UK that regulatory body Ofcom may end up doing just that. I suppose it may not bother readers who do not care so much for hard-won and not-at-all-guaranteed liberal values. But when this instinct to ban or to curtail or to suppress starts to appear in reality – first X, then what? – I suspect we will witness no small amount of backtracking. “Yes we said ban X, but we didn’t mean it like that!” will not be a sufficient defence to the precedent we are about to set.
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And yet we are currently just tinkering at the margins. Too much of the conversation in Ireland is about whether politicians should be on X personally; too much effort is expended quibbling with legal minutiae and petty squabbles about the right to offend. Not enough time is spent making full-throated defences of what were once assumed to be basic principles of a free society: that government should not attempt to shut down private companies that host public conversation. This, meanwhile, is not incompatible with the desire to regulate the illegality out of Grok.
[ Regulation too slow to stem tsunami of AI-generated child sex imageryOpens in new window ]
But all of this does point to a bigger existential question for countries staring down the barrel of the Trump administration and its inextricable links with erratic and all-too-powerful tech companies. If you told anyone in Government Buildings 20 years ago that social media would become a frontline in foreign policy, they might have reasonably hit back with an eyeroll and an “as if”. But as we know, the tech behemoths have the ear of Trump – front-and-centre at last year’s inauguration, for example – and even Musk is back in favour with his old friend. At the same time the career boundary between politics and Silicon Valley is as porous as ever: Nick Clegg is leader of Britain’s Liberal Democrats one day and head of global affairs at Facebook the next.
The constant umm-ing and ahhh-ing over what to do with TikTok – whose parent company is the Chinese-state-owned ByteDance, and whose European HQ is in Dublin – is just another example of the digital realm crashing hard into political reality. More than once the US has gestured towards a ban, anxious about Chinese access to American private data. And then there was that headscratcher for Ireland, in the shape of a €13 billion EU-imposed fine on Apple.
[ Una Mullally: How rotten does X have to be before politicians finally leave it?Opens in new window ]
So what is a government to do with this mess? Where a new front in geopolitics has opened, constantly stress-testing national values? This is where a government needs to have a higher-order philosophical vision – or a steadfast and unwavering commitment to certain liberal values. Because getting stuck in a game of policy whack-a-mole against Musk’s X is one thing. Doing so without a guiding political lodestar will be impossible.
And so, contained within the Grok and X saga in Ireland and the UK, I see two countries without a firm or clear grasp of their own principles. Or two governments afraid to make the unfashionable argument that spheres of public conversation are sacred and should not be subject to nationwide bans. That the argument is so unfashionable, by the way, only strengthens the need to make it.
