Australia's eSafety commissioner wrote to X in January after its AI chatbot Grok was used to generate sexualised images of women and children online. Australia's eSafety commissioner wrote to X in January after its AI chatbot Grok was used to generate sexualised images of women and children online. Child abuse material'systemic' on Elon Musk's X amid Grok scandal, Australian online safety regulator warned The Australian online safety regulator warned Elon Musk's X amid the Grok sexualised image generation scandal that it found child abuse material was "particularly systemic" on X and more accessible than on "any other mainstream service", correspondence obtained by Guardian Australia reveals. The eSafety commissioner wrote to X in January after its chatbot, Grok, was used to generate sexualised images of women and children online, which the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, described as "abhorrent". In the letter, obtained by Guardian Australia under freedom of information laws, eSafety's general manager of regulatory operations, Heidi Snell, pointed to Musk's promise when taking over the platform in 2022 that "removing child exploitation is priority #1", but said "the availability of CSEM [child sexual exploitation material] continues to appear particularly systemic on X".

A Victorian lawyer has become the first in Australia to face professional sanctions for using artificial intelligence in a court case, being stripped of his ability to practise as a principal lawyer after AI generated false citations that he had failed to verify. Guardian Australia reported in October last year that in a 19 July 2024 hearing, the anonymous solicitor representing a husband in a dispute between a married couple provided the court with a list of prior cases that had been requested by Justice Amanda Humphreys in relation to an enforcement application in the case. When Humphreys returned to her chambers, she said in a ruling that neither herself nor her associates were able to identify the cases in the list. When the matter returned to court the lawyer confirmed that the list had been prepared using legal software that utilised AI. He acknowledged he did not verify the accuracy of the information before submitting it to the court.

YouTube should be included in the ban on under-16s accessing social media, the nation's online safety chief has said as she urges the Albanese government to rethink its decision to carve out the video sharing platform from new rules which apply to apps such as TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram. The eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, also recommended the government update its under-16s social media ban to specifically address features such as stories, streaks and AI chatbots which can disproportionately pose risk to young people. The under-16s ban will come into effect in December 2025, despite questions over how designated online platforms would verify users' ages, and the government's own age assurance trial reporting last week that current technology is not "guaranteed to be effective" and face-scanning tools have given incorrect results. Although then communications minister Michelle Rowland initially indicated YouTube would be part of the ban legislated in December 2024, the regulations specifically exempted the Google-owned video site. Guardian Australia revealed YouTube's global chief executive personally lobbied Rowland for an exemption shortly before she announced the carve out.

Australia must "lean in hard" to the benefits of artificial intelligence or else risk ending up "on the end of somebody else's supply chain", according to the new industry and science minister, Tim Ayres, with the Labor government planning to further regulate the rapidly evolving technology. Ayres, a former official with the manufacturing union, acknowledged Australians remained sceptical about AI and stressed that employers and employees needed to have discussions about how automation could affect workplaces. The minister said Australia had "no alternative" but to embrace the new technology and seek to become a world leader in regulating and using AI. "It's the government's job to lean into the opportunity to outline that for businesses and for workers, but also to make sure that they are confident that we've got the capability to deal with the potential pitfalls," Ayres told Guardian Australia. "I think the Australian answer has got to be leaning in hard and focusing on strategy and regulation that is in the interest of Australians."

A one-stop portal for victims to report AI deepfakes to police should be established, the federal police union has said, lamenting that police were forced to "cobble together" laws to charge the first person to face prosecution for spreading deepfake images of womenlast year. The attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, introduced legislation in parliament in June that will create a new criminal offence of sharing, without consent, sexually explicit images that have been digitally created using artificial intelligence or other forms of technology. The Australian Federation Police Association (Afpa) supports the bill, arguing in a submission to a parliamentary inquiry that the current law is too difficult for officers to use. They pointed to the case of a man who was arrested and charged in October last year for allegedly sending deepfake imagery to Brisbane schools and sporting associations. The eSafety commissioner separately launched proceedings against the man over his failure to remove "intimate images" of several prominent Australians last year from a deepfake pornography website.

In medieval Europe, barber-surgeons might cut your hair, shave your face, do a bit of blood-letting and tend to a broken limb. They might also pull a tooth out with a "pelican" – a crude beak-like shank – or lever it out with an iron "tooth key". By the 17th century they might just knock it out with a steel punch elevator. It's a winding, gruesome road from these early practitioners of dentistry to today's world of 3D printing, artificial intelligence and robots that can create dental implants. Wayne Sampson, a dental historian and emeritus professor at the University of Adelaide, says the history of dental work goes back much further than the barber-surgeons.

"Very creepy," was April's first thought when she saw her face on a generative AI website. April is one half of the Maddison twins. She and her sister Amelia make content for OnlyFans, Instagram and other platforms, but they also existed as a custom generative AI model – made without their consent. "It was really weird to see our faces, but not really our faces," she says. Deepfakes – the creation of realistic but false imagery, video and audio using artificial intelligence – is on the political agenda after the federal government announced last week it would introduce legislation to ban the creation and sharing of deepfake pornography as part of measures to combat violence against women.

Heralded as the ChatGPT for music, Suno AI is the latest iteration of generative artificial intelligence to flood social feeds, wowing users with its (ahem) lyrical prowess. Plug in the musical style you want, a genre and a prompt for lyrics and Suno can spit out a full song for you in a matter of seconds. The business has been around for two years, formulated by a group of machine learning experts in Cambridge who struck an interest in audio, according to a profile in Rolling Stone last month. From the outset, making silly songs is slightly addictive. The lyrics might seem shallow and soulless, but they're also often hilarious.

At first glance, if you squint, you might think it was a photograph: a couple nuzzling together in the front row of a concert hall, in a Facebook advertisement for the Queensland Symphony Orchestra (QSO). But look again and you'll see why it's caused a stir among creative workers and the union representing them. The couple's tangled fingers are both too large and too many; there's a strange sheen making them look more like wax dolls; and then there's the clothes: she in a tulle gown encrusted with jewels, he in a tuxedo – and, simultaneously, a tulle gown encrusted with jewels. Also: she has a large cube on her lap. "Want to do something different this Saturday? Come see an orchestra play," reads the ad.

Since generative AI exploded into global consciousness in 2023, an unprecedented demand for computing power has emerged alongside the demand for apps utilising the technology. Tool's like OpenAI's ChatGPT require thousands of Nvidia GPUs (graphics processing units) to smoothly process all the information being fed in and output. Nvidia last week compared GPUs to rare earth metals for AI, saying they're "foundational" for the operation of generative AI today. The energy required to power all this hardware is the equivalent of a small country, according to a report released by French energy company Schneider Electric last year. On Wednesday OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, told an audience at Davos that an energy breakthrough was needed to power AI advances.