NZ yet to act on Grok, as others ban it over sexualised deepfakes

Wednesday, 14 January 2026

In response, X owner Elon Musk accused the British government of wanting to suppress free speech. He also posted an AI image of Keir Starmer in a bikini. Tech expert expert Paul Spain joined Lisette Reymer to talk us through it.

While X owner Elon Musk and the UK spar over his social media platform’s AI chatbot Grok - and how it has been creating child sexual abuse imagery - the New Zealand Government is waiting on a report before taking any action.

Minister of Internal Affairs Brooke van Velden told Stuff she was concerned about Grok’s “deeply harmful” generation of non-consensual sexual deepfake images, and while she had not received any official briefings on X to date, she had tasked officials with monitoring the issue.

Officials would provide a report with their advice before any further next steps would be considered, van Velden said.

Eleanor Parkes, a spokesperson for ECAPT (End Child Prostitution and Trafficking) New Zealand, said Grok was “hugely problematic”, and that a swift and decisive response was needed.

“The issue is that in New Zealand we haven’t yet had a discussion around how we see privacy in an AI world, and we don’t yet have a shared understanding around privacy and AI-generated images,” she said.

“Until we have regulations and policies supporting that vision and those values, just banning things is a bit of a piecemeal and reactive approach.”

In the UK, they were set to introduce laws making it illegal to create non-consensual explicit images, while the country’s media regulator Ofcom was investigating a Grok ban. Musk has called the British government “fascist” and accuses it of trying stifle free speech.

Other countries have also taken action against Grok, with Indonesia and Malaysia becoming the first two nations to ban it.

An example of Grok digitally altering an image without the user's consent.

NetSafe chief online safety officer Sean Lyons said there were many apps that caused harm, and it was important that people had the tools to protect themselves.

Lyons told Stuff the focus of any policy should be on harm-reduction, whatever the app.

“It’s not about where it was made, necessarily, or even who made it. It’s about making sure that if an individual is harmed by content that’s online, then action can be taken.”

Lyons said it was important that, when people became aware of harmful content online, they report it straight away so efforts could be made to get it removed swiftly.

He said AI had created a “very different picture” when it came to this issue, with it increasingly difficult to distinguish between real and fake images.

“I think certainly that there’s a degree of anxiety around what is possible using that technology,” Lyons said.

ACT MP Laura McClure proposed a bill to criminalise the creation and sharing of non-consensual sexually explicit deepfakes, which was pulled from the ballot in October and is to be considered this year.

Her bill aims to tweak existing laws to encompass images or videos that are created, synthesised, or altered to depict a person’s likeness in intimate contexts without their consent.

“No-one should have to worry about their digital images being misappropriated and sexualised,” McClure said in a statement announcing the bill last year. “This new form of bullying, shaming, and harassment can lead to profound psychological, reputational, and emotional harm.”