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Marketplace All-in-One

AI deepfakes could lead to fines and country-wide bans

13 Jan 2026

Transcription

Chapter 1: What legal actions are being taken against AI deepfakes?

1.212 - 13.089 Stuart Clarkson

An X against X. Why AI deepfakes could lead to fines and country-wide bans. Live from the UK, this is the Marketplace Morning Report from the BBC World Service. I'm Stuart Clarkson. Good morning.

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13.109 - 31.817 Stuart Clarkson

As mounting pressure on Grok, the AI chatbot that's part of Elon Musk's social media platform X, the UK is rushing through a new law this week which will make it illegal to create non-consensual intimate images. And other countries, including Malaysia and Indonesia, have blocked access to Grok in the past few days. Well, let's talk to Olivia Solon now.

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31.897 - 41.334 Stuart Clarkson

She's a technology editor at Bloomberg based in London. Hi, Olivia. Hi. So there's a lot of pressure on governments around the world to take action. How far do you think this could go?

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41.495 - 43.038 Olivia Solon

These are very serious allegations.

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Chapter 2: How are countries responding to non-consensual intimate images?

43.078 - 64.632 Olivia Solon

Clearly, we're dealing with child sexual exploitation material, which is illegal for platforms to host and distribute. And then there's non-consensual intimate imagery, which is colloquially known as revenge porn. And even these types of images, if they are generated by AI, in many countries, they're still considered to be illegal to create and to share.

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64.612 - 79.827 Olivia Solon

There's enough evidence that XAI is not removing these items as quickly as it should be doing. It could face pretty serious penalties, perhaps starting with fines and then moving through to even blocking the service in certain countries, as we've already seen.

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80.067 - 92.779 Stuart Clarkson

Yeah, and Malaysia, one of those countries, its communication regulator saying today it's going to take legal action against X. We've heard in the UK from the regulator Ofcom, which is going to investigate. So what could the outcome of that be? Big fine for X?

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92.911 - 102.682 Olivia Solon

So Ofcom has a very lengthy process, which they keep on sharing with us, which is a sort of, I think it's like a dozen steps, and we're at steps like two or three at the moment.

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103.123 - 124.248 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.

124.809 - 146.458 Olivia Solon

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

146.438 - 165.426 Olivia Solon

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.

165.406 - 177.662 Stuart Clarkson

And there are other tools that use AI to do this kind of thing. The difference with Grok is that it posts them automatically onto the internet. And also it's got a high profile owner in Elon Musk. Has that put them more in the firing line?

177.862 - 185.592 Olivia Solon

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.

Chapter 3: What penalties could Grok face for AI-generated explicit content?

394.282 - 416.492 Unknown

Yes, for certain computations, the power of these chips is rather mind-foggling. So in December, we actually ran a benchmark computation on this chip, which took just a few minutes here on the Willow chip, but it would have taken 10 septillion years. This is a one with 25 zeros on today's top supercomputer.

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419.071 - 432.351 Faisal Islam

So there's a special feature of this process, which it happens at extremely low temperatures. And Julian wants to show us just how low that temperature is with some liquid nitrogen.

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432.371 - 443.688 Julian Kelly

Liquid nitrogen. Yeah, it's around minus 200 degrees Celsius or 77 Kelvin. So we've got here just, for example, a nice little clover and we can dump some liquid nitrogen onto it.

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443.708 - 447.373 Faisal Islam

And so what's the relevance of the cold to the chick?

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447.657 - 454.835 Julian Kelly

Our chips are superconducting, and when you get certain metals cold, in our case, aluminum, they become superconducting and they have zero resistance.

Chapter 4: What are the implications of AI-generated images on social media?

455.236 - 460.57 Julian Kelly

It is one of the coldest places in the universe. Colder than you'd find in outer space or really anywhere else.

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462.49 - 468.276 Faisal Islam

Take us 20 years into the future. What are we doing with quantum computers in 2045?

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469.257 - 483.213 Unknown

So I think we will use it to help with many problems that humankind has. It will enable us to discover drugs more efficiently. It will help us make food production more efficient.

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483.493 - 489.139 Faisal Islam

20 years into the future, what are we doing with quantum computers in 2045?

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489.119 - 514.131 Unknown

So I think we will use it to help with many problems that humankind has. It will enable us to discover drugs more efficiently. It will help us make food production more efficient. It will help us with the energy economy, like to produce energy, to transport energy, to store energy, to build technologies that make life more pleasant for all of us.

514.229 - 523.602 Stuart Clarkson

Faisal, as I'm reporting from California, our producer is Neil Morrow. Our editor is Naomi Rainey. In the UK, I'm Stuart Clarkson with the Marketplace Morning Report from the BBC World Service.

525.684 - 546.917 David Brancaccio

Hey, it's David Brancaccio, host of the Marketplace Morning Report. It has been one year since the costliest set of wildfires in California history, US history, and by at least one calculation, the history of the world. 16,000 structures were destroyed, most of them homes. I can quote your figures about insured versus uninsured losses measured in billions.

547.478 - 569.418 David Brancaccio

But as people in the fire zones face year two, we go from macro to micro. I'm checking in with the neighbors on one street in Altadena, where 15 homes were destroyed on a single block. These are my own neighbors. I lost a home on that street too. Join us for on-the-ground reporting as we hear from people still dealing with insurance, getting permits, finding contractors.

569.819 - 584.28 David Brancaccio

One guy had to go through 30 contractors to find one with the right skills he could afford. Plus, for most, rebuilding is taking years. How do people find the money to live elsewhere? Listen to the Marketplace Morning Report using your favorite podcast app.

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