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MINISTER FOR FOREIGN Affairs Helen McEntee has said she believes X’s AI tool ‘Grok’ should be banned.
McEntee, a former minister for justice, said Elon Musk’s social media platform is “just toxic” and that collectively “we need to be pushing back against social media companies” when it comes to child sexual abuse images.
Speaking to Irish media in Egypt yesterday afternoon, McEntee said the ability of AI to generate such images is “beyond comprehension”.
She is among a growing number of Irish politicians who are this week calling for greater action to be taken against the social media giant in response to its recent ‘undressing’ scandal.
McEntee said she uses X to communicate work she is doing as a public representative, but that she would “reconsider” her use of it as a result of this latest scandal.
“My preference would to not be on it in many ways, but I think it is a useful platform to be able to communicate.
“I think that’s where a lot of people stand, how do we balance that and still do our job and work effectively and communicate what we’re doing? But there are probably other ways we can do it,” she said.
Grok, an AI tool embedded in the social media platform X, and it has come under fire in recent days over reports users can create sexual abuse images, including of children.
At the end of December, it rolled out an “edit image” button that allowed users to alter any image on X.
Within days, the platform was flooded with requests from people asking Grok to partially or completely remove clothing from women and underage girls.
The bot could not tell when a request is being made to digitally alter an image of a child, which has prompted accusations that Grok was being used for generating and disseminating child sexual abuse images.
The European Commission has said it is “very seriously looking” into complaints about the tool in what is the latest controversy surrounding the use of AI to create non-consensual sexual images of women and children.
Yesterday, gardaí confirmed that they are actively investigating 200 reports of potential child sexual abuse imagery generated by Grok.
They added that images reported to them were treated the same whether they were AI-generated or not.
A number of politicians, including media minister Patrick O’Donovan and the entirety of the Green Party and the Social Democrats, have already left the platform.
Niamh Smyth, the minister of state responsible for AI, met with the Taoiseach yesterday to discuss the issue. She is due to meet the Attorney General at 5pm today for further discussions.
With reporting from Eimer McAuley
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