Ted Cruz pelted with insane AI memes as X bans unpaid users from editing pics with Grok



Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) can thank his own legislation for putting a stop to deepfakes on Grok and X.

Cruz introduced the Take It Down Act in early 2025, aimed at stopping online publication of "intimate visual depictions of individuals," both authentic and computer-generated.

'These unlawful images ... should be taken down and guardrails should be put in place.'

According to the BBC, an usual trend of asking xAI tool Grok to artificially remove people's clothing from their photos has permeated across the website and has even extended to victimizing children, according to the Guardian.

In response, X owner Elon Musk announced consequences for anyone inappropriately uploading content.

"Anyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content," Musk wrote.

X's safety team followed suit, saying it would take action against "illegal content," including permanently suspending accounts and working with law enforcement.

When Cruz made note of the unlawful images and praised X for addressing the issue, he was hit with a string of bizarre attempts to use Grok against him.

RELATED: The early social media reviews of Cruz's 2028 POTUS trial balloon are in

— (@)

"These unlawful images ... should be taken down and guardrails should be put in place," Cruz wrote.

What followed were remarks like users asking Grok to put "Ted Cruz on his knees" in front of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; in this case, Grok obliged.

Other obvious violations of the Take It Down Act included generated photos of Cruz naked, photos of body parts in his mouth, and multiple AI photos of him wearing a dress, sometimes while wearing a yarmulke.

One user even posted an AI video of Cruz saying he was upset with Tucker Carlson for not wanting to date him.

RELATED: Elon Musk's xAI inks new deal with War Department

Photo by Alex Slitz/Getty Images

On January 6, however, Cruz himself posted an AI-generated video regarding "Trump's Venezuela Magic," which showed President Trump making former Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro magically appear onstage.

Despite others taking issue with his own usage of AI generation, Cruz's post is unlikely to be against his own drafted bill because it does not contain "intimate visual depictions."

Additionally Variety reported that X has now limited AI image editing to paid users only.

U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has rung alarm bells over the controversy, advocating for "all options to be on the table" in terms of legal punishment and a possible ban of the platform.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Stephen Miller Reveals Major Family News

'Easily the best part of my life'

In Deleted Social Media Posts, Michigan Senate Candidate Abdul El-Sayed Repeatedly Drew Equivalence Between 9/11 and the US Response

Abdul El-Sayed, a candidate in the Democratic primary for Michigan's open Senate seat, repeatedly drew an equivalence between 9/11 and the ensuing war on terror in since-deleted posts on X and a 2021 op-ed, arguing that both were "perpetrated ignorantly" and driven by "tribalistic grievance."

The post In Deleted Social Media Posts, Michigan Senate Candidate Abdul El-Sayed Repeatedly Drew Equivalence Between 9/11 and the US Response appeared first on .

Brave New Words

A book promising to explain the cynical, attention-grabbing tricks of social media while casting an adoring eye on the linguistic novelties of Reddit, Facebook, TikTok, X, and so on, aims to perform a worthy public service. It looks to expose the hidden dynamics of online culture while giving benighted readers a chance to know the linguistic progeny of young influencers. That is before, in all likelihood, taking a hard pass on their slangmaxxing.

The post Brave New Words appeared first on .

Trump admin leaves Elon Musk's Grok, xAI off massive list of AI tech partners



Elon Musk's artificial intelligence platform has seemingly been left out of a government program to launch the technology forward.

On Monday, the White House announced a new project aimed at accelerating innovation and discovery to "solve the most challenging problems of this century."

'The Genesis Mission will bring together our Nation’s research and development resources.'

The new Genesis Mission is described by the Department of Energy as "a national initiative to build the world's most powerful scientific platform."

An executive order from the president titled "Launching the Genesis Mission" explained plans to integrate federal scientific datasets to train AI to test new hypotheses, automate research, and speed up the occurrence of scientific breakthroughs.

"The Genesis Mission will bring together our Nation’s research and development resources — combining the efforts of brilliant American scientists, including those at our national laboratories, with pioneering American businesses; world-renowned universities; and existing research infrastructure, data repositories, production plants, and national security sites — to achieve dramatic acceleration in AI development and utilization."

With Elon Musk making strides in 2025 with both the advancement of his Grok chatbot and its video generation model, Imagine, tech enthusiasts were shocked to find out that Musk's xAI was not on a list of partners for the project.

RELATED: Big Tech’s AI boom hits voters hard — and Democrats pounce

— (@)

The Department of Energy includes 55 companies on its lists of collaborators for Genesis, with xAI and Grok nowhere to be found.

Aside from the fact that Musk was a special government employee under the Trump administration, his exclusion is even more surprising given both the length and generic nature of the companies that are involved. Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft were announced as partners, as were AI companies like OpenAI and Scale AI.

It should be noted that company xLight, which is listed by the DOE, is not affiliated with Musk.

RELATED: Log into this Gmail clone to read all the Jeffrey Epstein emails as if you were Epstein himself

— (@)

"For [xAI] to not be a part of the Genesis Mission, it is not just an oversight, it would have to be an intentional omission," AI engineer Brian Roemmele wrote on X. "I spoke to someone on this project who asked for my input today, and it is the first thing I brought up. I am certain they will see the error made."

Blaze News contacted xAI for comment but did not receive an immediate reply. This article will be updated with any applicable response.

Whether a rift exists between Musk and the Trump administration is unclear, but the government seems steadfast in believing its mission is monumental in terms of importance, likening it to the World War II nuclear arms race.

"The world's most powerful scientific platform to ever be built has launched," the DOE claimed on its X account. "This Manhattan-Project-level leap will fundamentally transform the future of American science and innovation."

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Bluesky founder reboots Vine for AI-free social media — as human-only video becomes 'nostalgic'



Jack Dorsey is bringing the nostalgia back, just a few seconds at a time.

Dorsey co-founded Twitter in 2007 and served as its inaugural CEO for a year until returning to the position for a six-year stint in its seemingly darkest years between 2015 and 2021.

Now, through his nonprofit called and Other Stuff, Dorsey is bringing one of the internet's most beloved applications back from the dead.

'Can we do something that takes us back, that lets us see those old things ...'

"So basically, I'm like, can we do something that’s kind of nostalgic?" said Evan Henshaw-Plath, Dorsey's pick to spearhead the revival. The New Zealander comes from Dorsey's nonprofit team, where he is known as Rabble, and has outlined aspirations to bring the internet vibe back to its Web 2.0 time period — roughly 2004-2010 or thereabouts.

Dorsey and Henshaw-Plath are rebooting Vine, the six-second video app that predominantly served viewers short, user-generated comedy clips. The format is a clear inspiration for modern apps like TikTok and formats like YouTube's Shorts and Instagram's Reels.

Dorsey and company are focused on keeping the nostalgic feel, however, and unlike the other apps, will keep a six-second time limit while also taking a stance on content. What that means, according to Yahoo, is that the platform will reject AI-generated videos using special filters meant to prevent them from being posted.

RELATED: Social media matrix destroys free will; Dorsey admits ‘we are being programmed’

i loved vine. i found it pre-launch, pushed the company to buy it (i wasn’t ceo at the time), and they did great. but over time https://t.co/HNsCMGtS04 (tiktok) took off, and and the founders left, leaving vine directionless. when i came back as ceo we decided to shut it down…
— jack (@jack) April 11, 2024

The new app, called diVine, will revive 10,000 archived Vine posts, after the new team was able to extract a "good percentage" of some of the most popular videos.

Former Vine users are able to claim their old videos, so long as they can prove access to previously connected social media accounts that were on their former Vine profiles. Alternatively, the users can request that their old videos be taken down.

"The reason I funded the nonprofit and Other Stuff is to allow creative engineers like Rabble to show what's possible in this new world," Dorsey said, per Yahoo.

This will be done by "using permissionless protocols which can't be shut down based on the whim of a corporate owner," he added.

Henshaw-Plath commented on returning to simpler internet times — as silly as it sounds — when a person's content feed only consisted of accounts he follows, with real, user-generated content.

"Can we do something that takes us back, that lets us see those old things, but also lets us see an era of social media where you could either have control of your algorithms, or you could choose who you follow, and it's just your feed, and where you know that it's a real person that recorded the video?" he asked.

RELATED: Twitter announces the demise of video-sharing app Vine, internet weeps (2016)

According to Tech Crunch, Vine was acquired by Twitter in 2012 for $30 million before eventually shutting down in 2016.

The app sparked careers for personalities like Logan Paul, Andrew “King Bach” Bachelor, and John Richard Whitfield, aka DC Young Fly. Bachelor and Whitfield captured the genre that was most popular on the platform: eccentric young performers who published unique comedy.

DiVine is currently in a beta stage and is available only to existing users of the messenger app Nostr.

X owner Elon Musk announced in August that he was trying acquire access to Vine's archive so that users could post the videos on his platform.

"We recently found the Vine video archive (thought it had been deleted) and are working on restoring user access, so you can post them if you want," Musk wrote.

However, it seems the billionaire may have been beaten to the punch by longtime rival Dorsey.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

EXCLUSIVE: George Soros Gave $250K to British Group Working To Censor Conservative News Sites and ‘Kill Musk’s Twitter’

The left-wing philanthropy funded by George Soros, Open Society Foundations (OSF), bankrolls a British nonprofit that works to censor conservative news websites and social media companies, including through a plot to "kill" Elon Musk’s X by pressuring advertisers and investors to boycott the company.

The post EXCLUSIVE: George Soros Gave $250K to British Group Working To Censor Conservative News Sites and ‘Kill Musk’s Twitter’ appeared first on .

A Harvard Dean Defended Death Threats Against Trump. The University Has Said Nothing.

Harvard University won’t say whether it will sanction a dean who defended “rioting and looting” as legitimate “parts of democracy,” described “whiteness” as a “self-destructive ideology,” and said it was acceptable to wish death on President Donald Trump.

The post A Harvard Dean Defended Death Threats Against Trump. The University Has Said Nothing. appeared first on .