UK Pressure Forces X to Disable Grok’s “Digital Undressing” Feature

Governments jerking a tech novelty back into compliance echoes Atlantic City’s 1893 ban on Kodak snapshot cameras that suddenly made beachgoers’ bodies public property, and the 2015 wave of U.S. “revenge-porn” statutes that shifted liability from victims to platforms. Starmer’s ultimatum highlights two century-long trajectories: every breakthrough in visual media first democratizes creation, then encounters a legal catch-up phase; and sovereignty over information has steadily migrated from companies’ terms of service to extraterritorial regulators armed with fines big enough to shape code. Whether today’s clamp-down endures will determine if generative AI follows the laissez-faire path of early social media or the tightly policed model of broadcast TV; in a 100-year frame, the precedent that algorithms—not just users—bear legal risk could close the “move fast, break things, ask forgiveness” era that defined the early 21st-century internet.