#deepfakes

#deepfakes

Grok's placement on the government website realfood.gov follows uproar over the chatbot's creation of millions of sexualized deepfakes of women and children in late December and its spouting of racist and antisemitic content last summer. Other government agencies are also using the chatbot made by xAI, Musk's AI company, but the prominent placement of Grok on realfood.gov over the weekend appears to be one of the first instances of the federal government pointing online visitors to Musk's chatbot.

There are people on the Internet who want to know all about you! Unfortunately, they don't have the best of intentions, but Google has some handy tools to address that, and they've gotten an upgrade today. The "Results About You" tool can now detect and remove more of your personal information. Plus, the tool for removing non-consensual explicit imagery (NCEI) is faster to use. All you have to do is tell Google your personal details first-that seems safe, right?

"Sarita" on Instagram appears to be the account the agency reported, showing a blonde woman wearing a Massachusetts State Police uniform, complete with a badge and a gun. In the pictures posted since Dec. 29, her name tags reads "Sara," "St. Pay," and "St. May." In one, the letters are unintelligible. The account has more than 100,000 followers as of Sunday evening. MSP declined to confirm the account.

The aim is to curb the rapid spread of manipulated images and videos used for abuse, harassment, and criminal exploitation. The initiative will be led by the Home Office and developed in collaboration with major technology companies, academic researchers, and technical experts. Ministers say the framework will explore how emerging technologies can better recognise and assess deepfakes, while also setting clear expectations for how companies detect and respond to them.

The French investigation was opened in January last year by the prosecutors' cybercrime unit, the Paris prosecutors' office said in a statement. It's looking into alleged "complicity" in possessing and spreading pornographic images of minors, sexually explicit deepfakes, denial of crimes against humanity and manipulation of an automated data processing system as part of an organized group, among other charges.

X and Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI also face intensifying scrutiny from Britain's data privacy regulator, which opened formal investigations into how they handled personal data when they developed and deployed Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot Grok.Grok, which was built by xAI and is available through X, sparked global outrage last month after it pumped out a torrent of sexualized nonconsensual deepfake images in response to requests from X users.

"Did your favorite sports star 'shock fans' or 'shake' the league by 'publicly' or 'flatly' refusing to wear an LGBT Rainbow Armband because it would turn the game 'into a political circus?'"

While this is a good start, traditional red-and-blue teaming cannot match the speed and complexity of modern adoption and AI-driven systems. Instead, agencies should look to combine continuous attack simulations with automated defense adjustments, enabling an automated purple teaming approach. Purple teaming shifts the paradigm from one-off testing to continuous, autonomous GenAI security by allowing agents to simulate AI-specific attacks and initiate immediate remediation within the same platform.

Belfast City Council looks set to suspend its use of social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, following recent concerns over its AI tool Grok. The council's strategic and resources committee on Friday decided it should "suspend posting on its account and signpost followers towards the council's other social media channels". The decision is subject to ratification at the next full council meeting on 2 February.

Ring has launched a new tool that can tell you if a video clip captured by its camera has been altered or not. The company says that every video downloaded from Ring starting in December 2025 going forward will come with a digital security seal. "Think of it like the tamper-evident seal on a medicine bottle," it explained. Its new tool, called Ring Verify, can tell you if a video has been altered in any way.

YouTube is just as wary of the rise of AI slop as you, and that's why more AI-generated content is coming to the platform in the near future. In a lengthy outlining YouTube's 2026 plans, CEO Neal Mohan said the company will continue to embrace this new "creative frontier" by soon allowing its creators to throw together Shorts using their AI-generated likeness.

So let me get this straight. The United States government spent years championing a ban on TikTok, rushed it through the Supreme Court with claims of grave national security threats, got a 9-0 ruling blessing government censorship of an entire platform used by 170 million Americans... and now it's the US State Department thinking that it's all cool to threaten the United Kingdom for considering similar action against X's Grok chatbot over its generation of sexualized deepfake images, including those of children?

I was born an only child, but now I have a twin. He's an exact duplicate of me -down to my clothing, my home, my facial expressions, and even my voice. I built him with AI, and I can make him say whatever I want. He's so convincing that he could fool my own mother. Here's how I built him-and what AI digital twins mean for the future of people.