Liz Kendall, the Technology Secretary, stood up in the Commons on Monday and thundered against Elon Musk, saying the government would take urgent measures to hold him to account. The reason for her broadside is that Grok, the AI chatbot owned by Musk and now integrated into X, has been misbehaving. In the past few weeks, it has granted users’ requests to create sexualised images of women and children, causing something close to meltdown among the Musk-hating chattering classes. In the Lords, scarcely a day passes without Labour’s favourite bogeyman being wheeled out to be pelted with verbal brickbats.

But how exactly does Kendall propose to rein Musk in? Sharing nudified pictures of children and non-consensual intimate images (NCII) of adults on social media is already prohibited by the Online Safety Act, and Ofcom has launched an inquiry into X for not removing them fast enough.

Kendall rightly condemned the creation of indecent images of children, but that was made a criminal offence by the Protection of Children Act 1978, so anyone asking Grok to do that is already breaking the law – and Musk has agreed to put a stop to it. At present, asking a chatbot to........

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