2026 has kicked off with major backlash against Elon Musk’s AI image editor, Grok Imagine, after the tool was used to generate hundreds of sexualised, non-consensual images of women and children (The Guardian).
This month, Belgian MP, Victoria Vandeberg, denounced a Grok-generated undressed photo of herself in parliament; Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines all ruled to block the Grok app; and Ofcom launched an investigation threatening to issue X with a fine of up to 10% of its worldwide revenue (BBC).
On 9th January, X partially restricted access to Grok so that free users couldn’t access the image generating tool. Since then, X issued a statement confirming that full restrictions have been put in place:
But instead of holding his hands up and leaving it there, Musk has gone after OpenAI, reminding everyone that Grok isn’t the only evil, apocalyptic AI tool out there:
Musk is now feuding with Ryanair over Michael O’Leary’s refusal to install SpaceX’s Starlink (satellite internet service) on their planes.
Last week, X suffered a U.S. outage, to which Ryanair posted: “perhaps you need Wi-Fi @elonmusk?”, mocking Musk and the Starlink system.
