Elon Musk’s platform X on Wednesday announced measures to prevent its AI chatbot Grok from undressing images of real people, following global backlash over its generation of sexualized photos of women and children.The announcement comes after California’s attorney general launched an investigation into Musk’s xAI — the developer of Grok — over the sexually explicit material and multiple countries either blocked access to the chatbot or launched their own probes.X said it will “geoblock the ability” of all Grok and X users to create images of people in “bikinis, underwear, and similar attire” in those jurisdictions where such actions are deemed illegal.”We have implemented technological measures to prevent the Grok account from allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing such as bikinis,” X’s safety team said in a statement. “This restriction applies to all users, including paid subscribers.”In an “extra layer of protection,” image creation and the ability to edit photos via X’s Grok account was now only available to paid subscribers, the statement added.The European Commission, which acts as the EU’s digital watchdog, earlier said it had taken note of “additional measures X is taking to ban Grok from generating sexualised images of women and children.””We will carefully assess these changes to make sure they effectively protect citizens in the EU,” European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier said in a statement, which followed sharp criticism over the nonconsensual undressed images.- ‘Shocking’ -Global pressure had been building on xAI to rein in Grok after its so-called “Spicy Mode” feature allowed users to create sexualized deepfakes of women and children using simple text prompts such as “put her in a bikini” or “remove her clothes.””The avalanche of reports detailing the non-consensual, sexually explicit material that xAI has produced and posted online in recent weeks is shocking,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said earlier Wednesday.”We have zero tolerance for the AI-based creation and dissemination of nonconsensual intimate images or of child sexual abuse material.”Bonta said the California investigation would determine whether xAI violated state law after the explicit imagery was “used to harass people across the internet.”Indonesia on Saturday became the first country to block access to Grok entirely, with neighboring Malaysia following on Sunday.India said Sunday that X had removed thousands of posts and hundreds of user accounts in response to its complaints.Britain’s Ofcom media regulator said Monday it was opening a probe into whether X failed to comply with UK law over the sexual images.And France’s commissioner for children Sarah El Hairy said Tuesday she had referred Grok’s generated images to French prosecutors, the Arcom media regulator and the European Union.Last week, an analysis of more than 20,000 Grok-generated images by Paris non-profit AI Forensics found that more than half depicted “individuals in minimal attire” — most of them women, and two percent appearing to be minors.

From playing football in the Oval Office to sipping cocktails on a sun lounger in Gaza and attacking critics from a fighter jet, Donald Trump has become the first US president to deploy AI-generated imagery as a key tool of political communications.In the first year of his second term in the White House, Trump ramped up his use of hyper-realistic but fabricated visuals on Truth Social and other platforms, often glorifying himself while lampooning his critics.Underscoring the strategy’s potential appeal to younger voters, similar AI-driven messaging has also been adopted by other arms of the Trump administration as well as by some of the president’s rivals.One of Trump’s posts depicts him playing football on the Oval Office’s carpeted floor with Cristiano Ronaldo, whom he describes as a “GREAT GUY” who is “really smart and cool.”Another AI post features Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sunbathing at a lavish resort, with “Trump Gaza” emblazoned on a sign in the background.The clip followed Trump’s proposal last year to turn Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East,” a suggestion that sparked widespread outrage. Trump or the White House have similarly shared AI-made images showing the president dressed as the pope, roaring alongside a lion, and conducting an orchestra at the Kennedy Center, a prestigious arts complex.”Welcome to the United States’ first White House administration to embrace and use imagery generated by artificial intelligence in everyday communication,” said a report by the nonprofit media institute Poynter.”With AI, Trump quickly deploys stereotypes and false narratives in entertaining posts that memorably distill complicated issues into their basest political talking points, regardless of factual basis.”- ‘Capture attention’ -Trump has reserved the most provocative AI posts for his rivals and critics, using them to rally his conservative base.Last year, he posted an AI video of former president Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office and appearing behind bars in an orange jumpsuit.Later, he posted an AI clip of House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries — who is Black — wearing a fake mustache and a sombrero. Jeffries slammed the image as racist.”For someone like Trump, unregulated generative AI is the perfect tool to capture attention and distort reality,” Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at the advocacy group Free Press, told AFP.”Obama was never arrested in the Oval Office. But calling Trump out for telling this lie won’t phase him or his followers. A leader who lies without any truth testing means that facts are contingent on Trump’s approval.”- ‘Nonstop political campaign’ -Analysts say the AI messaging amounts to a strategy of campaigning through trolling, a tactic that could resonate with voters ahead of this year’s midterm elections.”While it would in many ways be desirable for the president to stay above the fray and away from sharing AI-generated images, Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that he sees his time in office as a nonstop political campaign,” Joshua Tucker, co-director of the New York University Center for Social Media and Politics, told AFP.”We should simply see his use of AI-generated political images as just one of many tools — his text- based social media posts often being another — he uses to continue this campaign.”In a study published last month by the scientific journal Nature, academics including Cornell University’s David Rand reported that human-AI dialogues may have a substantive effect on voters’ electoral decisions.Back-and-forth exchanges with AI tools advocating for political candidates shifted opposition voters’ preferences substantially in the United States, Canada and Poland, the study said.In a sign of its potency, Trump’s AI strategy has been mimicked by other departments of his administration and his critics.Trump’s health chief Robert F. Kennedy Jr — under fire over medical misinformation — recently promoted a “Make Santa Healthy Again” Christmas campaign using an AI video while the US  Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deployed AI imagery in its immigration crackdown.Last month, California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, trolled the president by posting an AI video on X depicting Trump and two senior administration officials in handcuffs.”It’s cuffing season,” the video declared.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr has long been known for vaccine skepticism and fringe views that bled into conspiracy — ideology he is now baking into the US public health system.In only a year since Donald Trump returned to the White House, experts say his health secretary’s reforms have stoked confusion over longstanding medical advice and diminished the global standing of US institutions, with potential ripple effects for decades.”The impact is real. The impact is certainly being seen across the board. And I think the scariest part is, we’re only in the first year,” epidemiologist Syra Madad told AFP.Former Democrat Kennedy — who allied with Trump after his own 2024 presidential campaign sputtered — has mostly won praise from his “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement.But he has sparked outrage among medical groups, and some Republicans, with moves that have sown doubt about long-proven vaccine safety, slashed research funding, and weakened disease prevention programs, even as the US experiences its worst measles outbreak in years.Kennedy stacked a key immunization advisory panel with figures whose anti-vaccine sentiment mirrors his own, and overhauled the pediatric schedule of shots to recommend fewer.”I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown professor who has worked in public health law and policy for decades.Kennedy governs “through hunch, instinct and social media, not through science,” Gostin told AFP.At a recent event celebrating the rollout of new federal dietary guidelines, Kennedy told a crowd of supporters that “trusting the experts is not a feature of science” but rather “a feature of tyranny.””People in authority lie,” the government official continued, adding that people must act as “the CEOs of our own health.”The sentiment is part of a broad effort to not only sow distrust but to prioritize “individual choice” over “population protection,” said Madad, who is the biopreparedness officer for New York’s municipal health and hospitals network.- ‘Dysfunctional’ -MAHA adherents have broadly praised Kennedy’s initial efforts.And some public health advocates have found cautious optimism in a limited number of federal health priorities, even if they criticized the methods. Trump and Kennedy have sought to strike deals with pharma companies, urging them to voluntarily lower common drug prices along with appetite-suppressing medications.And in a rare alignment with mainstream scientific consensus, the administration vowed to remove synthetic dyes from food — primarily through voluntary compliance from industry.But Scott Faber of the Environmental Working Group said he doesn’t see such strategies panning out.”There’s a graveyard of voluntary industry initiatives that shows that handshake agreements and industry commitments are no better than the paper they’re written on,” Faber told AFP.In the case of food coloring, Faber said those agreements were made possible because the Republican-leaning West Virginia in 2025 enacted a broad ban on synthetic dyes, setting a new standard.Many nutritionists also met with enthusiasm new dietary guidelines that strongly discouraged added sugars and highly processed foods — though an endorsement of red meat and full-fat dairy along with vague advice on limiting alcohol triggered worry.Nutritionist Marion Nestle told AFP that within the wider political context, such advice carries less weight.”Eating real food is not going to make America healthy again in the face of a public health system that is completely dysfunctional,” she told AFP.- ‘Generational trauma’ -Americans, especially parents, have been left with conflicting information and confusion.Pew Research Center polling showed 63 percent of Americans still have high confidence that childhood vaccines are effective at preventing severe illness. But it found uncertainty over safety testing, especially among Republicans.Rebuilding confidence in medical institutions could be difficult, Madad said.”This is going to be generational trauma.”Gostin said the United States has gone from a global leader in scientific innovation to a “laughingstock.””It’s impossible to overstate how much our reputation is dropped.”Researchers, he said, are leaving the government, the country or even the field — potentially creating major gaps in the development pipeline for treatments of deadly diseases.”There’s every reason to have deep concerns about the future,” Gostin said.

One year into his second term, US President Donald Trump is shattering the post-World War II order as never before, leaving a world that may be unrecognizable once he is through.Far from slowing down, Trump — who turns 80 in June — has rung in the new year with a slew of aggressive actions that brazenly defy the decades-old structure that was championed by the United States.Trump on January 3 ordered an attack on oil-rich Venezuela that left more than 100 people dead in which commandos snatched leftist president Nicolas Maduro, a longtime US nemesis.Since then, Trump has threatened force against both friend and foe.The Republican leader has ramped up calls to seize Greenland from NATO ally Denmark and warned of striking Iran as the clerical regime violently represses protests.He has also mused of military action in both Colombia and Mexico, although has appeared to back down after speaking to their presidents — a mercurial style his supporters say shows that Trump prefers diplomacy when he can achieve outcomes he likes.But Trump has also jettisoned traditional ways of statecraft as he vows to go it alone in his “America First” vision, most recently pulling the United States out of dozens more UN bodies and other international groups. “Many international organizations now serve a globalist project rooted in the discredited fantasy of the ‘End of History,'” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, referring to the post-Cold War hope of a stable world with a consensus for democracy.Trump’s unrepentant embrace of force has also played out at home. Led by Vice President JD Vance, his administration offered not even pro forma sympathy when a masked anti-immigration agent fatally shot a motorist in Minneapolis, instead surging in forces.Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s racially charged anti-immigrant campaign who has played a growing role in foreign policy as White House deputy chief of staff, said it was time to move beyond “international niceties.””We live in a world, in the real world… that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Miller said in a CNN interview.- No higher purpose -The United States led the creation of post-World War II international institutions from the United Nations to NATO, which Trump has also denounced as unfair to the United States.US leaders have frequently been accused of hypocrisy, such as in 2003 when George W. Bush invaded Iraq after bypassing the United Nations.The difference, some observers say, is that Trump rarely even makes the pretense of pursuing higher “universal” principles such as promoting democracy.In Venezuela, where Rubio and others had long branded Maduro illegitimate after reports of wide election irregularities, Trump has dismissed the opposition and said he wants to work with Maduro’s vice president, the new interim leader.Trump said the priority was to control Venezuela’s oil and that he would wield the threat of force to keep the country in line.French President Emmanuel Macron warned that the current American approach could spell an era of “new colonialism and new imperialism,” four years after Russia invaded Ukraine.”The United States is an established power, but one that is gradually turning away from some of its allies and breaking free from international rules that it was still promoting recently,” Macron said.- Permanent changes -Melanie Sisson, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, said the United States had long succeeded “without having to attack, conquer and invade.” “We were generally able to get our way, more often than not, using other tools of influence, exercised through international organizations and alliances,” she said.Even if Europe pines for the liberal order, Sisson said other powers are sure to follow Trump’s lead in pursuing raw self-interest.”I don’t think there’s going to be a reconstruction of the post-World War II international order as we might recognize it,” she said.”That doesn’t mean some of the core principles of that order couldn’t be reconstituted, but Trump is reshaping international politics in a way that will be durable.”One diplomat from a US ally, who spoke on condition of anonymity to be frank, said even if Trump’s methods can be shocking, the time was ripe for change.Russia and Israel both pursued military campaigns unimpeded by wide international condemnation, he said.”It was clear that the global order wasn’t working, even if we pretended it was.”