Grok AI deepfake victim says UK government should have acted faster

Grok AI deepfake victim says UK government should have acted faster

A Welsh presenter has spoken out, insisting that swifter intervention by the UK government could have helped prevent more cases of deepfake sexual images created through the AI tool Grok. Jess Davies, an online safety advocate from Penarth in the Vale of Glamorgan, revealed that explicit content depicting her was produced by Grok AI and shared without her consent when the software was accessible to over 500 million users on the social platform X. Davies criticized X’s owner, Elon Musk, accusing him of “monetising image abuse” after the platform announced that only subscribing users can now utilize the AI’s image generation feature.

The UK government has recently declared that legislation making AI-generated explicit images illegal will be enacted this week. Although the law was ready since June 2025, it was only recently designated a “priority offence.” Despite this progress, Davies and other campaigners contend that the delay allowed several victims to suffer unnecessarily. She expressed frustration over the government’s slow response, stating, “I don’t know why the government dragged their feet for so long,” and reflecting on how more rapid action might have altered outcomes for those affected.

Grok AI, developed by X, functions as a chatbot that responds to user prompts and can create or edit images based on these inputs. Following its November 2023 launch, reports emerged that the tool was being misused to generate explicit images of individuals without their permission, which were then disseminated publicly. While UK law prohibits sharing intimate deepfakes without consent, until recently, creating such images using AI was not criminalized. The regulator Ofcom has initiated an investigation into whether Grok AI violated online safety regulations. Although the image generation feature is now limited to paying users on X, some users have found ways to produce images through the free app version.

Additional victims have also spoken out about the abuse they suffered through Grok AI. Dr Daisy Dixon, a philosophy lecturer at Cardiff University, described receiving death and rape threats alongside non-consensual AI-generated images of herself after publicly raising concerns about Grok. She highlighted the broader issue of misogyny both online and in society, explaining how these attacks feel like an assault on women’s very digital existence. Dixon emphasized the importance of recognizing that it is human users behind the creation of such harmful content, not the platform itself, and questioned why so many individuals feel compelled to engage in this behavior. On the political front, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer warned that X risks losing its “right to self regulate” if it fails to control the chatbot, while Science Secretary Liz Kendall condemned the AI-generated deepfakes as “an affront to decent society,” stressing their devastating impact, particularly on women and girls

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