Category: X
Ted Cruz pelted with insane AI memes as X bans unpaid users from editing pics with Grok
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) can thank his own legislation for putting a stop to deepfakes on Grok and X.
Cruz introduced the Take It Down Act in early 2025, aimed at stopping online publication of “intimate visual depictions of individuals,” both authentic and computer-generated.
‘These unlawful images … should be taken down and guardrails should be put in place.’
According to the BBC, an usual trend of asking xAI tool Grok to artificially remove people’s clothing from their photos has permeated across the website and has even extended to victimizing children, according to the Guardian.
In response, X owner Elon Musk announced consequences for anyone inappropriately uploading content.
“Anyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content,” Musk wrote.
X’s safety team followed suit, saying it would take action against “illegal content,” including permanently suspending accounts and working with law enforcement.
When Cruz made note of the unlawful images and praised X for addressing the issue, he was hit with a string of bizarre attempts to use Grok against him.
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“These unlawful images … should be taken down and guardrails should be put in place,” Cruz wrote.
What followed were remarks like users asking Grok to put “Ted Cruz on his knees” in front of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; in this case, Grok obliged.
Other obvious violations of the Take It Down Act included generated photos of Cruz naked, photos of body parts in his mouth, and multiple AI photos of him wearing a dress, sometimes while wearing a yarmulke.
One user even posted an AI video of Cruz saying he was upset with Tucker Carlson for not wanting to date him.
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Photo by Alex Slitz/Getty Images
On January 6, however, Cruz himself posted an AI-generated video regarding “Trump’s Venezuela Magic,” which showed President Trump making former Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro magically appear onstage.
Despite others taking issue with his own usage of AI generation, Cruz’s post is unlikely to be against his own drafted bill because it does not contain “intimate visual depictions.”
Additionally Variety reported that X has now limited AI image editing to paid users only.
U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has rung alarm bells over the controversy, advocating for “all options to be on the table” in terms of legal punishment and a possible ban of the platform.
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Australia BANS key social media apps for kids under 16 — and platforms must enforce the rule
Australia will put the onus on social media platforms to limit access to children under 16 years old.
The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024 amended Australia’s reigning online safety measures and gave social media companies time to age‐restrict their platforms and “take reasonable steps to prevent Australian under 16s from having account[s].”
‘No Australian will be compelled to use government identification.’
Officially taking effect on December 10, the ban includes Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Threads, X, and YouTube’s general platform; YouTube Kids and WhatsApp do not meet the criteria for the ban.
Australia introduced its social media minimum-age framework that included a list of criteria that would result in a platform being banned for those under 16. This included if a platform’s sole purpose, or “significant purpose,” is to “enable online social interaction between two or more end‐users.”
Or if the service “allows end‐users to link to, or interact with, some or all of the other end‐users” and “allows end‐users to post material on the service” and “meets such other conditions (if any) as are set out in the legislative rules,” it will not be available for younger Australians.
The legislation can also specify certain platforms, or classes, to not include in the ban.
Social media platforms will be responsible for enforcement, and neither children nor their parents will face punishment should they gain access. Companies face fines of up to $32 million USD or just under $50 million in Australian dollars.
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Photo by DAVID GRAY/AFP via Getty Images
The government further defined the requirements placed upon the platforms, adding that they must “take reasonable steps to prevent” those under 16 from having accounts.
The legislation also specified that “no Australian will be compelled to use government identification (including Digital ID) to prove their age online” and that platforms must offer reasonable alternatives to its users.
According to the BBC, other countries are hot on Australia’s tail in terms of implementing their own similar bans. This includes the French government, which has begun a parliamentary inquiry into banning children under 15 years old from social media, while also implementing a “digital curfew” for those between 15 and 18.
The Spanish government has also drafted a law that would require parental consent for children under 16 to access social media.
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Photo by DAVID GRAY/AFP via Getty Images
Ruling left-wing Labour Party official Anika Wells, who serves as Australia’s communications minister (and minister of sport), said that the ban is not “perfect” and is going to “look a bit untidy on the way through.”
“Big reforms always do,” she added.
Australians under 16 will still be able to access content that is available on a website without being logged in or being a member, as there is virtually no way to prevent that without restricting access to the internet entirely.
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Trump admin leaves Elon Musk’s Grok, xAI off massive list of AI tech partners
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence platform has seemingly been left out of a government program to launch the technology forward.
On Monday, the White House announced a new project aimed at accelerating innovation and discovery to “solve the most challenging problems of this century.”
‘The Genesis Mission will bring together our Nation’s research and development resources.’
The new Genesis Mission is described by the Department of Energy as “a national initiative to build the world’s most powerful scientific platform.”
An executive order from the president titled “Launching the Genesis Mission” explained plans to integrate federal scientific datasets to train AI to test new hypotheses, automate research, and speed up the occurrence of scientific breakthroughs.
“The Genesis Mission will bring together our Nation’s research and development resources — combining the efforts of brilliant American scientists, including those at our national laboratories, with pioneering American businesses; world-renowned universities; and existing research infrastructure, data repositories, production plants, and national security sites — to achieve dramatic acceleration in AI development and utilization.”
With Elon Musk making strides in 2025 with both the advancement of his Grok chatbot and its video generation model, Imagine, tech enthusiasts were shocked to find out that Musk’s xAI was not on a list of partners for the project.
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The Department of Energy includes 55 companies on its lists of collaborators for Genesis, with xAI and Grok nowhere to be found.
Aside from the fact that Musk was a special government employee under the Trump administration, his exclusion is even more surprising given both the length and generic nature of the companies that are involved. Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft were announced as partners, as were AI companies like OpenAI and Scale AI.
It should be noted that company xLight, which is listed by the DOE, is not affiliated with Musk.
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“For [xAI] to not be a part of the Genesis Mission, it is not just an oversight, it would have to be an intentional omission,” AI engineer Brian Roemmele wrote on X. “I spoke to someone on this project who asked for my input today, and it is the first thing I brought up. I am certain they will see the error made.”
Blaze News contacted xAI for comment but did not receive an immediate reply. This article will be updated with any applicable response.
Whether a rift exists between Musk and the Trump administration is unclear, but the government seems steadfast in believing its mission is monumental in terms of importance, likening it to the World War II nuclear arms race.
“The world’s most powerful scientific platform to ever be built has launched,” the DOE claimed on its X account. “This Manhattan-Project-level leap will fundamentally transform the future of American science and innovation.”
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It’s not just you. X and vast tracts of the internet are down.
Large sections of the internet stopped working on Tuesday morning. Among the sites affected by the latest in a weeks-long series of outages were Amazon Web Services, X, League of Legends, the betting site bet365, Spotify, ChatGPT, and — ironically — the website that monitors online outages, Downdetector.
The problem appears to be the result of issues at Cloudflare, a San Francisco-headquartered tech company that effectively serves as a backbone to a myriad of sites, providing content delivery network and wide area network services, domain registration, and cybersecurity.
‘We saw a spike in unusual traffic.’
At the time of writing, the Cloudflare system status page indicated that the company was working toward restoring global network services, having hours earlier acknowledged “experiencing an internal service degradation” that could leave some services “intermittently impacted.”
The latest outages come just days after Cloudflare admitted an “issue which potentially impacts multiple customers” — an issue that was supposedly “resolved.”
A spokesperson for Cloudflare said in a statement obtained by the Guardian, “We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20am [London time]. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors. While most traffic for most services continued to flow as normal, there were elevated errors across multiple Cloudflare services.”
“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic,” continued the spokesperson. “We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic.”
The company’s engineers were reportedly scheduled to conduct some maintenance work on data centers in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Tahiti, and Santiago, Chile. It’s unclear whether their efforts had anything to do with the technical issues.
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