France opened an inquiry in January 2025 into allegations that X, formerly known as Twitter, was used to interfere in French politics. The probe has since widened to cover allegations of Holocaust denial, distribution of sexual deepfakes and most recently possible complicity in the distribution of images of child sexual abuse.
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a charity group which aims to remove child abuse material from the internet, discovered various examples of explicit images of young girls that had been generated by Grok, with some victims as young as 11 years old.
The biggest [reason for leaving] is [Fandom's] increasingly aggressive use of ads, which is something us editors do not generally think about as the majority of ads are hidden when logged in. But given that 60%+ of our viewers (and a similar stat on many other Fandom wikis) are logged-out mobile visitors, the concern for advertising being aggressive and intrusive is not one we should take with a grain of salt. It is terrible.
Brief videos generated by the model, including a clip featuring Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt, soon went viral and drew intense criticism from Hollywood. While one successful screenwriter declared that the footage meant, "It's likely over for us," studios quickly sent ByteDance a flurry of cease-and-desist letters, with Disney's lawyers accusing the company of a "virtual smash-and-grab of Disney's IP."
This expansion is really about the integrity of the public conversation. We know that the risks of AI impersonation are particularly high for those in the civic space. But while we are providing this new shield, we're also being careful about how we use it.
Public officials and journalists will soon be able to keep track of AI-generated deepfakes of themselves on YouTube through the platform's likeness detection feature. The tool is already available to millions of content creators on YouTube, but beginning Tuesday, it will expand to a pilot group of journalists, government officials, and political candidates.
The threat is no longer a discrete piece of bad content that a keyword list or a domain block can catch. Its volume - hundreds of millions of posts a day, a growing share of them generated or manipulated by tools that didn't exist two years ago, uploaded across every major platform faster than any human review process can follow.
When Jody Hughes' daughter asked Adobe Express for Education, graphic design software provided by her teacher, to generate an image of "long stockings a red headed girl with braids sticking straight out," it produced nothing resembling the Swedish children's book character she had accurately described. Instead, using recently-added artificial intelligence, it generated sexualized imagery of women in lingerie and bikinis.