Teacher fights discrimination against the Roma people, one Elvis song at a time

BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) — Tudor Lakatos is fighting discrimination against the Roma people, one Elvis Presley song at a time.

Decked out in a rhinestone shirt and oversized sunglasses, with his black hair slicked back into a 1950s-style quiff, Lakatos swivels his hips and belts out his own idiosyncratic versions of hits like “Blue Suede Shoes” at venues throughout Romania.

But don’t call him an Elvis impersonator. Lakatos prefers to say that he “channels” the King of rock ‘n’ roll’s global appeal to break down stereotypes about the Roma and provide a positive role model for Roma children.

“I never wanted to get on stage, I didn’t think about it,” Lakatos, 58, said after a recent gig at a restaurant in the capital, Bucharest. “I only wanted one thing — to make friends with Romanians, to stop being called a Gypsy,″ he added, using an often derided term for people belonging to the Roma ethnic group.

The Roma, an ethnic group that traces its roots to South Asia, have been persecuted across eastern Europe for centuries and are still associated with high rates of poverty, unemployment and crime. They account for about 7% of the population of Romania, where a fifth say they have faced discrimination in the past year, according to a recent survey by the European Union.

Lakatos’ quest to change that began in the early 1980s when he was an art student and Romania was ruled by the hard-line communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu.

At a time when anti-Roma discrimination was mainstream, Lakatos found that singing Elvis songs was a way to connect with ethnic Romanian students while rock music was a symbol of rebellion against the oppressive government.

Four decades later, he’s added a new audience.

A school teacher for the past 25 years, Lakatos uses his music to show his students that they can aspire to something more than the dirt roads and horse driven carts of their village in northwestern Romania.

“The adjective Gypsy is used everywhere as a substitute for insult,” Lakatos said. “We older people have gotten used to it, we can swallow it, we grew up with it. I have said many times, ‘Call us what you want, dinosaur and brontosaurus, but at least join hands with us to educate the next generation.'”

But Lakatos still crisscrosses the country to perform at venues large and small.

On a hot summer evening, that journey took Lakatos to Terasa Florilor in Bucharest, a neighborhood joint whose owner takes pride in offering live music by local artists who perform on a stage made of wooden beams painted in vivid colors.

The audience included those who came for the show and others attracted by the sausages, pork roast and Moldavian meatballs on the menu. A few danced and others took selfies as they enjoyed Lakatos’ trademark “Rock ’n’ Rom” show, a mix of Elvis songs delivered in the Romani language, Romanian and English.

The eclectic mix of languages can sometimes lead to surprises because there isn’t always a literal translation for Elvis’ 1950s American English.

For example, “Don’t step on my blue suede shoes” doesn’t make sense to many of the children he teaches because they are so poor, Lakatos said.

In his version, the lyric Elvis made famous becomes simply “don’t step on my bare feet.”

It’s a message that Elvis — born in a two-room house in Tupelo, Mississippi, during the Great Depression — probably would have understood.

Tudor Lakatos, who goes by the stage name Elvis Rromano, performs with the Taraful Frunzelor band at the Terasa Florilor restaurant, in Bucharest, Romania, Friday, June 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Andreea Alexandru)

Customers dance as Tudor Lakatos, who goes by the stage name Elvis Rromano, performs at the Terasa Florilor restaurant with the Taraful Frunzelor band, in Bucharest, Romania, Friday, June 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Andreea Alexandru)

A customer records video as Tudor Lakatos, right, who goes by the stage name Elvis Rromano, performs at the Terasa Florilor restaurant, along with Nicolae Feraru, left, and Stefan Marin, center, of the Taraful Frunzelor band, in Bucharest, Romania, Friday, June 20, 2025.(AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)

Tudor Lakatos, who goes by the stage name Elvis Rromano, poses outside the Terasa Florilor restaurant before a performance in Bucharest, Romania, Friday, June 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Andreea Alexandru)

Tudor Lakatos, who goes by the stage name Elvis Rromano, strikes a pose while getting ready for his performance with the Taraful Frunzelor band at the Terasa Florilor restaurant, in Bucharest, Romania, Friday, June 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)

LONDON (AP) — Laws that will make it illegal to create online sexual images of someone without their consent are coming into force soon in the U.K., officials said Thursday, following a global backlash over the use of Elon Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot Grok to make sexualized deepfakes of women and children.

Musk's company, xAI, announced late Wednesday that it has introduced measures to prevent Grok from allowing the editing of photos of real people to portray them in revealing clothing in places where that is illegal.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer welcomed the move, and said X must “immediately” ensure full compliance with U.K. law. He stressed that his government will remain vigilant on any transgressions by Grok and its users.

“Free speech is not the freedom to violate consent," Starmer said Thursday. “I am glad that action has now been taken. But we’re not going to let this go. We will continue because this is a values argument.”

The chatbot, developed by Musk's company xAI and freely accessed through his social media platform X, has faced global scrutiny after it emerged that it was used in recent weeks to generate thousands of images that “undress” people without their consent. The digitally-altered pictures included nude images as well as depictions of women and children in bikinis or in sexually explicit poses.

Critics have said laws regulating generative AI tools are long overdue, and that the U.K. legal changes should have been brought into force much sooner.

A look at the problem and how the U.K. aims to tackle it:

Britain's media regulator has launched an investigation into whether X has breached U.K. laws over the Grok-generated images of children being sexualized or people being undressed. The watchdog, Ofcom, said such images — and similar productions made by other AI models — may amount to pornography or child sexual abuse material.

The problem stemmed from the launch last year of Grok Imagine, an AI image generator that allows users to create videos and pictures by typing in text prompts. It includes a so-called “spicy mode” that can generate adult content.

Technology Secretary Liz Kendall cited a report from the internet Watch Foundation saying the deepfake images included sexualization of 11-year-olds and women subjected to physical abuse.

“The content which has circulated on X is vile. It is not just an affront to decent society, it is illegal,” she said.

Authorities said they are making legal changes to criminalize those who use or supply “nudification” tools.

First, the government says it is fast-tracking provisions in the Data (Use and Access) Act making it a criminal offense to create or request deepfake images. The act was passed by Parliament last year, but had not yet been brought into force.

The legislation is set to come into effect on Feb. 6

“Let this be a clear message to every cowardly perpetrator hiding behind a screen: you will be stopped and when you are, make no mistake that you will face the full force of the law,” Justice Secretary David Lammy said

Separately, the government said it is also criminalizing “nudification” apps as part of the Crime and Policing Bill, which is currently going through Parliament.

The new criminal offense will make it illegal for companies to supply tools designed to create non-consensual intimate images. Kendall said this would “target the problem at its source.”

The investigation by Ofcom is ongoing. Kendall said X could face a fine of up to 10% of its qualifying global revenue depending on the investigation’s outcome and a possible court order blocking access to the site.

Starmer has faced calls for his government to stop using X. Downing Street said this week it was keeping its presence on the platform “under review."

Musk insisted Grok complied with the law. “When asked to generate images, it will refuse to produce anything illegal, as the operating principle for Grok is to obey the laws of any given country or state,” he posted on X. “There may be times when adversarial hacking of Grok prompts does something unexpected. If that happens, we fix the bug immediately.”

FILE - Workers install lighting on an "X" sign atop the company headquarters, formerly known as Twitter, in downtown San Francisco, July 28, 2023. (AP Photo/Noah Berger, File)