Three Tennessee teenagers launched a lawsuit today against Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok for allegedly generating sexually explicit deepfake images of them without their consent.
Earlier this year, X Corp. met with widespread criticism after reports emerged saying there had been a proliferation of deepfake sexualized images being promulgated on various platforms, images generated by people using the Grok chatbot. This came after X announced a new feature called “spicy” mode.
Today’s lawsuit marks the first time minors have sued a company over a company allowing the generation of nonconsensual sexual material to be shared on one of its platforms. The lawsuit was filed in a federal California court by three young women, each of them claiming their appearance was altered by Grok in either image or video form without their knowledge to show them in a sexualized manner.
“xAI, and its founder Elon Musk, saw a business opportunity,” the complaint reads. “They knew Grok could produce such results, including by using the images and videos of children, and publicly released it anyway.” Elsewhere, it compares the images to “a rag doll brought to life through the dark arts.”
Two of the teens are under the age of 18, although all three decided to withhold their names. Each of them is seeking damages for a “devastating loss of privacy, dignity, and personal safety” while asking that Grok be banned from creating such images in the future.
According to the complaint, a girl named only as Jane Doe 1 was tipped off on Instagram that nude photos and videos of her and other minors had been appearing on the social media platform Discord. She alleges that someone had taken real photos of her at her school’s homecoming dance or from the school yearbook and used Grok to make her appear naked.
Police arrested the person responsible in December last year, but on searching the person’s devices, they found images or videos of girls from the same school, some of whom are Jane Doe 2 and Jane Doe 3.
xAI Chief Executive Elon Musk, who had previously promoted Grok’s “spicy” feature, has since said he wasn’t aware of Grok generating images of naked underage people. In January, he announced that Grok would no longer generate images of girls in bikinis.
Photo: Unsplash
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