The Minister for Media has deleted his X profile, saying he did not feel comfortable being on a platform where sexual deepfakes were allowed.
While Patrick O’Donovan said he had left the platform over general issues with abuse and the ongoing controversy about non-consensual intimate images and child abuse material, Tánaiste Simon Harris said he did not intend to leave the platform as it’s “better to be on the pitch”.
It emerged over the last number of weeks that Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot that is based on the social network X, had been generating illegal images at the request of users. This included child sex abuse material and non-consensual intimate images of women, which were created using a feature which allows people to be “undressed”.
On Friday, Grok started to impose restrictions on users who try to use the AI model to create non-consensual intimate images. The Grok app now offers content warnings and moderations when users try to command it to undress or “nudify” images. Users of Grok on the X social network were also told that requests to generate sexualised images will only be granted for paid subscribers.
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An Irish Times journalist was still able to use the Grok app to partially undress pictures of herself, including some of her as a teenager and a child.
Mr O’Donovan told Limerick Live 95 radio that he had experienced a lot of abuse on X over the last number of years.
“I actually deactivated my X account so I’m not on X any more,” he said.
“I deactivated it early this morning, because, to be quite honest about it over the last number of months, over the last number of years really, I don’t find it a platform that I would use to share information any more,” he said, citing the “wave of abuse” that would follow posts.
Asked if the concerns around Grok this week had also prompted him to deactivate it, he said: “It was, yeah, it was.
“I’m minister for communications and I’m minister for media, and I just felt that like, if you’re on a platform where this is allowed, regardless of whether you’re paying for it or not, I just don’t feel comfortable with it.”
Asked about politicians leaving X at the Young Scientist exhibition on Friday, Tánaiste Simon Harris said that he was “kind of grappling with in my own mind”. However, he said he did not currently intend to come off X.
“My view has generally been as a politician and as a political leader and as a leader of a centrist party, it’s better to be on the pitch. And if I leave a social media site, the social media site doesn’t just go away and the citizens of Ireland don’t stop using it either. So my on balance view is that it’s always better to be on the pitch engaging in communicating rather than creating just a vacuum.”
However, he said he fully understood why some people would reach a different conclusion.
On Friday evening, Young Fine Gael announced it would boycott the platform due to “ongoing and severe failures to protect children and [because of] Elon Musk’s ownership”.
Niamh Smyth, the junior minister with responsibility for AI, requested a meeting with X to discuss the generation and hosting of illegal content on the social network, which bases its European headquarters in Dublin.
The company made contact with Ms Smyth on Friday afternoon to confirm representatives would meet her in the coming weeks.
Elon Musk boasted online this week after Grok reached the top of the free app chart on the Irish Apple store.
Apple, which bases its European headquarters in Cork, says that apps featured on its store must meet its terms and conditions for “objectionable content.” This means that apps should not feature “overtly sexual or pornographic material,” including apps that “may be used to facilitate prostitution, or human trafficking and exploitation.”
Apple has declined to respond to questions from The Irish Times about the presence of Grok on its app store.
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