Olivia Solon

But in theory, you know, after it'll have some back and forth with the company, interrogate whether the company has taken action quickly enough to remove this material, and then ultimately it could issue fines and even block the service in the country.

I think the issue here is going to be that

most of the images posted to X were not super explicit.

They're people in underwear or bikinis, and it's being done without people's consent, but they might not meet the bar for illegal material, non-consensual intimate image abuse, or AI-generated CSAM.

There are very specific criteria to meet those thresholds, and I think there has been a little bit of a conflation between

Pictures of people in bikinis that have been created non-consensually, which may potentially meet the bar, but may not, and revenge porn.

And similarly, the same, unfortunately, with pictures of kids, putting a kid in a bikini does not make that child sexual exploitation material, however unpalatable you might find that.

Well, I think there's another aspect we've got to consider, which is the guardrails that have been put into Grok and Elon Musk has been experiencing.

explicit that grok has fewer guardrails it's more permissive than other models thinking about like chat gpt and google's gemini in terms of creating more risque images so that has put it in the firing line yes and the kind of automatic distribution platform it has in the shape of x which is unusual the other models don't typically immediately publish their outputs although i believe sora does have a standalone app which is open ai's video generation model

And then Elon Musk obviously is in the firing line.

He's been this, you know, bit of firebrand talking about free speech, meddling in British politics.

So I'm sure the government is happy to engage in a sparring match with him.

But I don't believe in this case, this is a politically motivated attack on the platform.

If illegal images are being posted to X, action does need to be taken.

So the law is something called the Digital Services Act, which is a kind of new rulebook for digital platforms across Europe.

And the main thing that the commission took issue with and that they find Elon Musk's ex for today was three things.

There was the blue tick and the fact that it was changed to a paid feature where it used to be a sort of sign that someone was kind of

authority on something.

Then they'd also stonewalled giving researchers access to data, and they didn't set up an advertising repository that provided transparency to researchers either.

So the fine today was kind of generally smaller than people had expected, but there are still some other issues that the commission's investigating, some more kind of serious issues around how it polices illegal content, election disinformation, and its community notes