David Vance SubstackRead More
Did you see that the authoritarian tyrants in the European Commission have opened a formal investigation into Elon Musk’s X platform over claims its AI tool Grok was used to generate sexualised images of real people, including potentially illegal deepfakes? Curiously the Commission remains indifferent to the unbelievably awful stuff on Bluesky, Snapchat and Reddit. Imagine my surprise on that front!
This new move follows a similar probe launched earlier this month by UK regulator Ofcom, making Grok one of the first high‑profile tests of how major platforms handle AI‑driven sexual imagery. There is no doubt that this is an EU-Ofcom lockstep assault on actual free speech dressed up in the vacuous rhetoric about “sexualised images of real people”!
Brussels will now examine whether Grok has created or distributed “manipulated sexually explicit images” to users within the EU, in possible breach of the bloc’s tough new Digital Services. If X is found to have broken the rules, the Commission can levy fines of up to 6% of the company’s worldwide annual turnover, potentially amounting to hundreds of millions of euros. The regulator has also warned it may impose interim measures if X fails to introduce “meaningful adjustments” while the case is ongoing.
This is the usual bombastic stuff we expect from the EU but it seems to have forgotten that President Trump, JD Vance and Marco Rubio have all made it clear that any attack on US owned social media will carry severe financial consequences!
The investigation itself comes after activists and provocateurs and condemned Grok’s ability to create sexualised images of real people, saying such functionality should “never have happened” and left users vulnerable to abuse and harassment. Ofcom has confirmed its own inquiry under the UK’s Online Safety Act will continue in parallel, focusing on whether X has adequate systems to prevent and remove non‑consensual intimate imagery.
In recent weeks X has that it had disabled Grok’s feature that digitally removes clothing from people in jurisdictions where this type of content is illegal. However, EU officials now want to know what safeguards were in place before the change, whether illegal images were already shown to European users, and how the company assesses risks when deploying new AI functions.
What the EU fails to accept that Grok never did ANYTHING that users did not request! Furthermore, the only “sexualised images” I saw were of Keir Starmer in a bikini! Ugh!
The truth is that this is the year that the EU will try to severely limit or even ban X. The EU hate freedom of speech and X is the one wild card they struggle with. This is NOT about AI images or sexualised images – it’s about control of what you say,.
