Editorial

Maria Raquel Guimarães

“sex, lies and videotape”: Apropos of Grok chatbot  
 
The world depicted in Steven Soderbergh's 1989 film "sex, lies and videotape" is a world without the internet, social media, or digital platforms, yet one in which the power of capturing images and technology’s potential to engage with intimacy remain latent. In the film, which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival that year, the arrival of Graham (played by a subtle James Spader, also winner of the Cannes award for best actor) disrupts the suburban love triangle formed by Ann (Andie MacDowell), her husband John (Peter Gallagher) and her sister Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo), creating a forced intimacy that everyone avoids and from which the truth eventually emerges. The director uses the video camera as another character in motion, while placing Graham's recordings at the centre of the story. 
The video camera serves as a metaphor for an alternative, isolated life without social contact, enhanced by technology, which Soderbergh introduces into private relationships — revealing his previous experience with editing and photography — and operates simultaneously as a protective shield, a pointed weapon, or a channel of communication. The transformation of intimacy mediated by image capture, which the film explores, proved prescient of a world of images in which technology is omnipresent and human relationships, more or less private, more or less intimate, develop in front of a camera, a mobile phone, or a computer. 
The action in "sex, lies and videotape" is not entirely unfamiliar with the legal world — although Soderbergh does not explore transgression in a clear way here, as he does in "Traffic" and “Erin Brockovich”, films that earned him two nominations for best director and an Oscar in 2001. Transgression appears in the film on a domestic level, with infidelity, and the script does not resist the irony of John being a solicitor. Some issues raised today by videos, and by images in general, such as consent requirements ("(...) Let's make a videotape. / No, I... ahem... I don't think that's a good idea. / Why not? / Because I don't think it's a choice that you'd make in a normal frame of mind. / And what would you know about a normal frame of mind? / That's a good question."), its boundaries and the distinction between image capture and dissemination are already touched upon in a still not hyperconnected coexistence ("Can we watch one? / No, I'd - uh, no. / Why not? / Well, I... promised each of the subjects that no one would see the videotapes except for me."). 
The title "sex, lies and videotape" has certainly gained new relevance in our times. The "lie" arises in the context of current recordings/captures associated with intimate images, more or less sexualised, manipulated by chatbots using artificial intelligence. The picture often represents a distorted or nonexistent reality and no longer reflects the truth that, in Soderbergh's film, existed within the video, isolated from the untruthful social environment.
The problem has taken on exceptional significance in the new “arena” of the Grok chatbot, owned by Elon Musk's start-up xAI, as well as the social network X, where it is installed on a public account, allowing users to ask questions and request image changes. According to data provided by the New York Times [“Musk's chatbot flooded X with millions of sexualised images in days, new estimates show”, Conger, Freedman, Thompson, 22.01.2026], in the nine days following Musk's publication on 31 December last year of a photograph of himself in a bikini, approximately 4.5 million images manipulated by Grok were published — generating the largest ever flow of traffic on X — with an estimated half of these being sexualised images of women. The reaction to this boom in deepfakes originating from the chatbot that “undresses” people came from across sectors, leading the X platform to restrict the image creation feature to premium customers on 8 January. 
In direct response to this “industrialisation” of deepfakes, the European Commission launched an investigation into X to assess the platform's compliance with the Digital Services Act (DSA) [Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 October 2022 on a Single Market For Digital Services and amending Directive 2000/31/EC, in OJ L 277, 65. year, 27.10.2022] on the assessment and mitigation of systemic risks. In the context of this process, Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, stated that deepfakes of women and children “are a violent, unacceptable form of degradation” and added that the ongoing investigation “will determine whether X has met its legal obligations under the DSA, or whether it treated rights of European citizens — including those of women and children — as collateral damage of its service.” 
At issue are the duties imposed by Articles 34 and 35 of the DSA and, ultimately, the lifting of the principle of non-liability for illegal activities or content enshrined in the E-Commerce Directive [Directive 2000/31/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 8 June 2000 on certain legal aspects of information society services, in particular electronic commerce, in the Internal Market, OJ L 178, 17.7.2000], now developed in Article 6 of the DSA. 
X, as a very large online platform, is required to “assess any systemic risks in the Union stemming from the design or functioning of their service and its related systems, including algorithmic systems, or from the use made of their services” (recital 79 and Article 34 of the DSA), in particular before introducing new functionalities. The DSA considers systemic risks to include, among others, the dissemination of illegal content, such as child pornography (recital 80), the limitation of fundamental rights protected by the Charter, in particular the right to human dignity, the right to privacy and the right to data protection (recital 81), and the design, operation and use of platforms with “actual or foreseeable negative effect on the protection of public health, minors and serious negative consequences to a person's physical and mental well-being, or on gender-based violence” [recital 83; cf. Article 34(1) DSA]. Among the various measures imposed on these platforms to mitigate systemic risks, Article 35 includes the need to ensure that “an item of information, whether it constitutes a generated or manipulated image, audio or video that appreciably resembles existing persons, objects, places or other entities or events and falsely appears to a person to be authentic or truthful is distinguishable through prominent markings when presented on their online interfaces, and, in addition, providing an easy to use functionality which enables recipients of the service to indicate such information.”
But X has not only disregarded and failed to mitigate the systemic risks that Grok poses. It appears to have also promoted its use precisely for the purpose of manipulating images with sexual connotations, mainly of women but also of children, which violate the rights to image, data protection, privacy, honour and truth, fostering misogyny, gender discrimination, the objectification of women and child pornography. To this extent, in addition to failing to comply with the aggravated duties imposed by the DSA on very large platforms to combat illegal content, there is also the removal of the “safe harbour” principle — under which online intermediaries who host or transmit content provided by a third party are exempt from liability for such content  —, as X cannot invoke actual ignorance of the illegal content [Article 6(1)(a) DSA] when the person behind the corporation beckons to his followers with the possibility of "undressing" anyone, like Nino Manfredi's character in Dino Risi's "I See Naked" (1969). And lifting the “veil” of non-liability paves the way for the platform's direct liability to those whose rights have been violated, under the national laws of the Member States. 
In the Portuguese legal system, the infringement of various personality interests — from image to truth, including honour and privacy — protected by the respective special personality rights, in addition to the violation of the general personality right enshrined in Article 70 of the Civil Code, constitutes a consistent basis for civil liability, as well as allowing the injured parties to request other measures appropriate to the case. Victims can invoke these rights not only against those who materially used the chatbot to manipulate the images and publish them, but also against the platform that promoted the production and dissemination of illegal content.
There is no doubt that the issues raised in “'sex, lies and videotape” would have a very different dimension if it were filmed today, with the digitisation of images and the possibility to share them, whether legally or not. The interactions between image, sex, and lies, in turn, have gone beyond the realm of science fiction, with the widespread use of artificial intelligence-powered software that has made it almost impossible to distinguish between falsehood and truth. The fear associated with losing control of one's image, already expressed in the film in the naïve style of Andie MacDowell's character (“(...) who knows where that tape may end up? He could be... bouncing it off some satellite or something.”) has never been so real, with the impact of new illegal activities taking on a global dimension.
The amoral voyeurism of those who watch the lives of others, however, remains unchanged and seems to have a vocation for eternity. As do James Spader's half-smiles.