#deepfakes

#deepfakes

One photorealistic Grok video, hosted on Grok.com, shows a fully naked AI-generated man and woman, covered in blood across the body and face, having sex, while two other naked women dance in the background. The video is framed by a series of images of anime-style characters. Another photorealistic video includes an AI-generated naked woman with a knife inserted into her genitalia, with blood appearing on her legs and the bed.

"In light of the recent controversies relating to Grok, I have written directly to X to request a meeting to discuss what steps the platform is taking to address these issues and to ensure compliance with Irish and EU law. I have also been in contact with Coimisiún na Meán and with the Office of the Attorney General to seek updates on how this matter is being assessed from a legal and regulatory perspective."

As 2025 gave way to the new year, something abominable transpired across X, formerly Twitter: A bunch of its paying subscribers spent the holidays ordering the "anti-woke" generative A.I. tool Grok to edit images of female users-from spambot accounts to K-pop celebrities to underage girls -by "removing" articles of clothing or fully "imagining" them in the nude.

The European Commission is intensifying its investigation into X due to the way in which the AI tool Grok is being used to generate sexualized deepfakes. This follows a series of recent reports from France, as previously reported by Techzine , which show that Grok generated explicit sexual images involving children. The case has led to criminal proceedings by the Paris Public Prosecutor's Office. In addition, French ministers are calling for the regulator ARCOM to be involved under the Digital Services Act (DSA).

On the left of one such billboard is a startling reality-bending image of former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau coiled around a stripper pole. Another billboard features an echo of the much-memed deepfake of Pope Francis in a stylish puffer coat. On the right of both billboards is an, evidently real, often sweaty, intimidatingly fit person in workout gear. Across both is the tagline, "Question Everything but Yourself," followed by the now familiar "Equinox It's not Fitness. It's Life."

AI-Enhanced Phishing and Deepfakes: No longer are phishing emails riddled with obvious errors. AI tools can instantly craft convincing messages by harvesting content from social media and corporate sites, personalizing scams to increase their effectiveness. Adding to this, deepfake technology enables cybercriminals to mimic voices and even video images of executives to authorize wire transfers or issue fake instructions, making fraud exponentially harder to detect.

Rather than training people to spot visual glitches in fake images or audio, Bores said policymakers and the tech industry should lean on a well-established cryptographic approach similar to what made online banking possible in the 1990s. Back then, skeptics doubted consumers would ever trust financial transactions over the internet. The widespread adoption of HTTPS-using digital certificates to verify that a website is authentic-changed that.

Some users of popular chatbots are generating bikini deepfakes using photos of fully clothed women as their source material. Most of these fake images appear to be generated without the consent of the women in the photos. Some of these same users are also offering advice to others on how to use the generative AI tools to strip the clothes off of women in photos and make them appear to be wearing bikinis.

Sora2 is the latest video AI model from OpenAI. The system generates completely artificial short videos from text, images, or brief voice input. Since October 2025, there has also been API access that developers can use to automatically create and publish AI videos. As a result, the number of artificial clips continues to grow every day. Many of them look astonishingly real and are almost indistinguishable from real footage for users.

The Turing test, a long-established tool for measuring machine intelligence, gauges the point at which a text-generating machine can fool a human into thinking it's not a robot. ChatGPT passed that benchmark earlier this year, inaugurating a new technological era, though not necessarily one of superhuman intelligence. More recently, however, artificial intelligence passed another threshold, a kind of Turing test for the eye: the images and videos that A.I. can produce are now sometimes indistinguishable from real ones.

As the rest of the world rushes to harness the power of artificial intelligence, militant groups also are experimenting with the technology, even if they aren't sure exactly what to do with it. For extremist organizations, AI could be a powerful tool for recruiting new members, churning out realistic deepfake images and refining their cyberattacks, national security experts and spy agencies have warned.

The AI transparency law mandates that advertisements clearly identify when they feature synthetic performers-digitally created media designed to appear as real people. The law aims to prevent consumers from being misled by content that blurs the line between reality and artificial creation. The second law updates New York's rights of publicity by requiring companies to obtain consent from heirs or executors before using a deceased individual's name, image, or likeness for commercial purposes.

In an announcement, Elon Musk's AI company xAI unveiled a new tool called "Halftime" which "dynamically weaves AI-generated ads into the scenes you're watching." Instead of cutting to an ad break, Halftime manipulates the characters onscreen into deviating from the script and prominently brandishing a product of a marketer's choice. The tool is meant to make ad "breaks feel like part of the story instead of interruptions," the company said.

It has been noted that some individuals who engage with AI tools report symptoms of psychosis-especially delusions-resulting from their interactions with AI. 1,2 It may not only be the AI interaction, but exposure to its products, such as deep fakes, that are implicated. In fact, any AI-generated doubt concerning the bedrock or background belief system that stops a cascade of delusional thinking from starting 3 may be implicated.

As AI continues lowering the barrier to malicious identity spoofing and fraud, Oscar Rodriguez, LinkedIn's vice president of product for Trust,told ZDNET that the program is designed to drive more trustworthy internet experiences and user-to-user engagement. "It is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference between what is real and what's fake," Rodriguez noted. "That, for us, was the driver because LinkedIn is about trust and authentic connections."

Across Europe we are witnessing an escalation in hybrid threats - from physical through to cyber - designed to weaken critical national infrastructure, undermine our interests and interfere in our democracies all for the advantage of malign foreign states,

The voice cloning in local dialects was the most demanded product and a real game changer,

It worries me that it's so normalised. He obviously wasn't hiding it. He didn't feel this was something he shouldn't be doing. It was in the open and people saw it. That's what was quite shocking. A headteacher is describing how a teenage boy, sitting on a bus on his way home from school, casually pulled out his phone, selected a picture from social media of a girl at a neighbouring school and used a nudifying app to doctor her image.