Hello, I'm Hugo Rifkin, and now we're going to be unpacking the politics of the day

from the government's battle with big tech to more your party drama and whether drinking is cool again.

And joining me are two people who are even cool sober, we hope, and they are the Times columnist James Marriott.

Hello, James. Good morning. Good morning. And the new Statesman's political correspondent, Megan Kenyon. Hello, Megan. Hi. Full disclosure. Are either of you drunk right now? No. No. I do feel slightly exhausted from book writing still. So I actually do feel slightly drunk. You're drunk on exhaustion. Drunk on the English language.

James Marriott's drunk on words. Put that on your grave set. Let's crack on. There's an awful lot I want to cover. It's all very, very, very important. Let's start with, let's start with what's going on with X and Grok. I know this has been much discussed, but it's really, it's bottomless. The government has taken aim at Big Tech with the announcement that non-consensual sexual deep fakes are going to be criminalised.

This, of course, comes after concerns about Elon Musk's GROC AI being used to digitally undress women,

which there's been much fuss about it. Some people are calling it a free speech issue.

Some people are simply saying it is a kind of sexual abuse issue. I guess the place to start here is Megan, how odd,

how incredibly odd that non-conceptual sexual deepfakes were not already criminalised? Yeah, I mean,

it is very odd, but I think as is the case with a lot of AI content, it's moving a lot faster than

the government and regulation is able to keep up with. I think what's particularly interesting

about this is what Elon Musk has done, which has basically put it behind a paywall,

which doesn't really seem like a good solution. You can make... You can pay for this and it's fine. Yeah, exactly. But I think it's definitely causing a bit of a

headache for the government because obviously Elon Musk, not famously a fan of Kirstama,

posts quite a lot about him. But I think there's a lot of pressure from Labour MPs, you know,

to do something about this. They're continuing

to sort of have to be on X, but I think that actually they're not really necessarily getting

the engagement that makes it worthwhile. So we had a story in the New Statesman yesterday, which

was, I think, from a, from a Labour staffer who was basically sort of saying, you know, we're

continuing to post on this platform that has all these horrible aspects to it, not getting much engagement.

But actually, we've been told, the quote was, we've been told to make memes that appeal to Gen Z and the chronically online.

So it sort of seems like it's quite bizarre that we're having this conversation about a platform that is sort of behaving quite ridiculously in sort of the manifestations that are kind of coming out of it.

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