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Censorship is not a word that should be used lightly. The internet blackout that followed recent protests in Iran has clearly been an act of deliberate sabotage—or censorship, on the part of the authorities in the country. This is in stark contrast, however, to the case of Grok and the spread of non-consensual sexualised deepfakes by the AI chatbot.
We supported the government’s decision to ensure that both the creation and sharing of this manipulated content is deemed a “priority offence” under UK law and urged Ofcom to conclude their investigation into X (xAI have developed and own Grok) as quickly as possible. xAI may now have made changes to Grok to restrict the ability of the bot to digitally undress people without their consent but we should also remember that Elon Musk has accused the UK government of being “fascist” and of seeking to curb free speech. The truth is that this case is entirely about public safety and the protection of fundamental personal freedoms.
Full Fact has highlighted several issues with Grok over recent months and, as we have written about, generative AI tools are anything but infallible. West Midlands police chief, Craig Guildford, had to acknowledge that his force had relied on Microsoft Copilot when producing a report into their decision to ban Israeli football fans from a match with Aston Villa last November, and the tool provided the force with false information. Hallucinations remain a regular feature of all these AI tools which is why it's important not to suspend critical thinking when using them and to conduct your own research. It’s puzzling to understand why West Midlands police could not have made a few calls to determine what they needed for this report.
All of this is why human-centred fact checking is more essential than ever and why the recent decision by the Trump administration to deny US working visas to Europeans focused on fact checking, content moderation and online safety is so disappointing. As the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) have said in the statement they released this week, these attacks on those committed to information integrity is a direct assault on our democratic values. “The ban on the visas is, in fact, censorship.”
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