A poster featuring an image of billionaire Elon Musk, calling for users of his X social media platform to delete their accounts due to the artificial intelligence chatbot Grok's image-creation feature, is seen at a bus stop in London on Tuesday. PARIS - Elon Musk's company xAI has faced global backlash in recent days over sexualized "deepfake" images of women and children created by its Grok chatbot. Here are the essential facts about the scandal, how governments have responded and the company's attempts to cool the controversy. Grok -- Musk's version of the chatbots also offered by OpenAI and other generative AI companies -- has its own account on the X social media network allowing users to interact with it. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

U.S. gives green light to Nvidia H200 chip exports to China U.S. President Donald Trump's administration will allow Nvidia to export its second most powerful AI chips to China after the company was previously barred from doing so. WASHINGTON - The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday gave a formal green light to China-bound sales of Nvidia's second most powerful AI chips, putting in place a rule that will likely kickstart shipments of the H200 despite deep concerns among China hawks in Washington. According to the regulations, the chips will be reviewed by a third-party testing lab to confirm their technical AI capabilities before they can be shipped to China, which cannot receive more than 50% of the total amount of chips sold to American customers. Nvidia will need to certify that there are enough H200s in the U.S., while Chinese customers must demonstrate sufficient security procedures and cannot use the chips for military purposes. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

If there is no red line around AI-generated sex abuse, then no line exists. For more than a week, beginning late last month, anyone could go online and use a tool owned and promoted by the world's richest man to modify a picture of basically any person, even a child, and undress them. This was not some deepfake nudify app that you had to pay to download on a shady backwater website or a dark-web message board. This was Grok, a chatbot built into X--ostensibly to provide information to users but, thanks to an image-generating update, transformed into a major producer of nonconsensual sexualized images, particularly of women and children. The forced undressings happened out in the open, in one stretch thousands of times every hour, on a popular social network where journalists, politicians, and celebrities post.

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is concerned with producing explanations indicating the inner workings of models. For a Rashomon set of similarly performing models, explanations provide a way of disambiguating the behavior of individual models, helping select models for deployment. However explanations themselves can vary depending on the explainer used, and need to be evaluated. In the paper "Evaluating Model Explanations without Ground Truth", we proposed three principles of explanation evaluation and a new method "AXE" to evaluate the quality of feature-importance explanations. We go on to illustrate how evaluation metrics that rely on comparing model explanations against ideal ground truth explanations obscure behavioral differences within a Rashomon set. Explanation evaluation aligned with our proposed principles would highlight these differences instead, helping select models from the Rashomon set. The selection of alternate models from the Rashomon set can maintain identical predictions but mislead explainers into generating false explanations, and mislead evaluation methods into considering the false explanations to be of high quality. AXE, our proposed explanation evaluation method, can detect this adversarial fairwashing of explanations with a 100% success rate. Unlike prior explanation evaluation strategies such as those based on model sensitivity or ground truth comparison, AXE can determine when protected attributes are used to make predictions.

As vehicles grow more software-dependent, repairing them has become harder than ever. A bill in the US House called the Repair Act would ease those restrictions, but it comes with caveats. Every time you get behind the wheel, your car is collecting data about you. Where you go, how fast you're driving, how hard you brake, and even how much you weigh. All of that data is not typically available to the vehicle owner.

NASA Artemis II plans to launch Feb. 6, 2025, sending astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen on the first crewed lunar mission in 50 years.

A Microsoft data center in Aldie, Virginia, on 28 October 2025. A Microsoft data center in Aldie, Virginia, on 28 October 2025. Trump says Microsoft will pay more for its datacenters' electricity Microsoft's president said firm won't accept tax breaks in towns for its datacenters as backlash against facilities grow Tue 13 Jan 2026 17.09 ESTLast modified on Tue 13 Jan 2026 17.16 EST Donald Trump said he is partnering with tech companies to ensure the large energy-hungry datacenters vital for AI do not drive up electricity bills in the US. On Tuesday, the US president announced that Microsoft was "first up". "We are the'HOTTEST' Country in the World, and Number One in AI. Data Centers are key to that boom, and keeping Americans FREE and SECURE but, the big Technology Companies who build them must'pay their own way.'"

Apple's Siri AI will be powered by Gemini The bill allows the victims of nonconsensual, sexually explicit deepfakes to sue the people who create and host them. The Senate has passed the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits (DEFIANCE) Act with unanimous consent, according to the bill's co-sponsor Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) . The bill lets the subjects of nonconsensual, sexually explicit deepfakes take civil action against the people who create and host them. Deepfakes are a known issue online, but without the proper protections, easy access to AI-powered image and video generation tools has made it possible for anyone to create compromising content using another person's likeness. This has become a particular problem on X, where the integration of Grok, the AI assistant created by X's parent company xAI, makes it possible for anyone to turn the content of another person's post into an image-generating prompt.

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Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., advanced legislation in the Senate that would allow people to sue over explicit AI-generated deepfake images.