M&S Christmas food sales soar but clothing suffers from cyber-attack fallout
Marks & Spencer revealed strong sales of food over the important Christmas trading period but clothing sales fell back as it continues to battle the after-effects of last year’s crippling cyber-attack.The company said its clothing, homeware and beauty business was also affected by “fragile consumer confidence and milder weather”.In November, M&S revealed that underlying profits had more than halved to £184.1m in the six months to 27 September, from £413.1m a year before, after it had to halt online orders for more than six weeks because of the cyber breach.
M&S said the poor Christmas fashion sales were linked to “the long tail impact on stock data and management following the incident” as well as “reduced high street footfall”.The numbers add to fears that fashion retailers have experienced a tough autumn and winter amid mild weather and a squeeze on household budgets caused by high energy and food bills.M&S is also thought to have lost out to rival Next which recorded bumper sales over Christmas partly thanks to its slick online service.The business said it would “accelerate the reshaping strategy” – under which it has been closing and moving stores that contain clothing and adding more space for food – “against the context of an uncertain consumer environment”.M&S now has about 230 full-line stores, which contain clothing and food, and almost 800 food-only stores.
The retailer said food sales at established stores rose by 5.6% in the three months to 27 December while clothing sales fell 2.9%.Total sales rose by 3.3% to £4.
15bn, excluding the addition of its Ocado joint venture the numbers for which M&S has begun to report.Stuart Machin, the chief executive of the high street stalwart said M&S’s non-food business was “getting back on track as we work through the tail end of recovery”.He said the food business had gained market share with sales growth underpinned by strong sales of core grocery items with new products and upgrades on products such as Italian ready meals, in-store bakery an deli all bringing in more shoppers.Sales at its online grocery specialist Ocado increased by 13.7% as the number of items ordered jumped by 10.
7 % and the number of orders increased by 11%,
Grok’s deepfake images which ‘digitally undress’ women investigated by Australia’s online safety watchdog
Australia’s online safety watchdog is investigating sexualised deepfake images posted on X by its AI tool Grok.Elon Musk’s X has faced a global backlash since Grok began generating sexualised images of women and girls without their consent in response to requests for it to undress them.Ashley St Clair, the estranged mother of one of Musk’s children, said she had no response to her complaints about being digitally undressed.“I felt horrified, I felt violated, especially seeing my toddler’s backpack in the back of it,” she said this week.The fake images included one of a 12-year-old girl in a bikini
Elon Musk’s xAI announces it has raised $20bn amid backlash over Grok deepfakes
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company has raised $20bn in its latest funding round, the startup announced Tuesday, even as its marquee chatbot Grok faces backlash over generating sexualized, nonconsensual images of women and underage girls.xAI’s Series E funding round featured big-name investors, including Nvidia, Fidelity Management and Resource Company, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, and Valor Equity Partners – the private investment firm of Musk’s longtime friend and former Doge member Antonio Gracias. The funding round exceeded its initial $15bn target, according to xAI’s press release. The company touted Grok’s image-generation abilities in the announcement of its latest funding round.xAI lacks the prominence of its rival OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and has continually drawn criticism for generating misinformation, antisemitic content and now potentially illegal sexual material
AI consciousness is a red herring in the safety debate | Letters
The concern expressed by Yoshua Bengio that advanced AI systems might one day resist being shut down deserves careful consideration (AI showing signs of self-preservation and humans should be ready to pull plug, says pioneer, 30 December). But treating such behaviour as evidence of consciousness is dangerous: it encourages anthropomorphism and distracts from the human design and governance choices that actually determine AI behaviour.Many systems can protect their continued operation. A laptop’s low-battery warning is a form of self-preservation in this sense, yet no one takes it as evidence that the laptop wants to live: the behaviour is purely instrumental, without experience or awareness. Linking self-preservation to consciousness reflects a human tendency to ascribe intentions and feelings to artefacts and not any intrinsic consciousness
Friction-maxxing: could less convenience lead to much more happiness?
Name: Friction-maxxing.Age: Brand new.Appearance: A lifetime of happy inconvenience.Is this another example of something that already exists, but people think is new because someone rebranded it? Yes, obviously it is that.Great! Let’s all save time by you telling me what it used to be called
Wave of Grok AI fake images of women and girls appalling, says UK minister
The UK technology secretary has called a wave of images of women and children with their clothes digitally removed generated by Elon Musk’s Grok AI “appalling and unacceptable in decent society”.After thousands of intimate deepfakes circulated online, Liz Kendall said X, Musk’s social media platform, needed to “deal with this urgently” and she backed the UK regulator Ofcom to “take any enforcement action it deems necessary”.“We cannot and will not allow the proliferation of these demeaning and degrading images, which are disproportionately aimed at women and girls,” she said. “Make no mistake, the UK will not tolerate the endless proliferation of disgusting and abusive material online. We must all come together to stamp it out
‘I felt violated’: Elon Musk’s AI chatbot crosses a line
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. Happy new year! I hope your 2026 is off to a great start. Today in tech, we are examining the output of Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, Grok, and the US’s ban on foreign drones.Late last week, Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot unleashed a flood of images of women, nude and in very little clothing, both real and imagined, in response to users’ public requests on X, formerly Twitter. Mixed in with the generated images of adults were ones of young girls – children – likewise wearing “minimal clothing”, according to Grok itself
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