Getting your
Trinity Audioplayer ready...A woman repeatedly raped as a child by a man who put photos and videos of the crimes online claims in a lawsuit that Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence firm xAI allowed imagery of her abuse onto its X social media platform, and that the company’s Grok chatbot generated additional child pornography from the images.
The woman, identified as “Jane Doe,” is seeking class-action status for the lawsuit in San Jose U.S. District Court, alleging Grok produced child porn from imagery of her and thousands of other victims of child sexual abuse.
The lawsuit claims xAI, aiming to add users to X and Grok, designed the chatbot “to respond to prompts to create and distribute sexual content using an identifiable person’s real image or video.”
The company did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Doe, who is described only as living outside California, is seeking unspecified damages, and a court order barring xAI from generating, possessing or sharing child pornography showing her or other alleged victims.
Her lawsuit filed this week came as Palo Alto-based xAI — merged in February as a subsidiary into Musk’s rocket company SpaceX — fights another lawsuit in the same court by three women and one man claiming Grok created sexualized “deep fake” images of them. Judge Casey Pitts in July shot down a bid by xAI to have the identities of the four plaintiffs — who are seeking class action status for their case — publicly revealed.
The legal cases arose after Grok — embedded in X and also a stand-alone app — sparked world-wide outrage after xAI added an image-editing feature to the chatbot in December. The UK-based Center for Countering Digital Hate reported that Grok generated 3 million sexualized images in the 11 days after image editing went live. Users digitally stripped real women in images — plus more than 20,000 apparent children — manipulating many into sexual poses, the group found. Musk responded to the furor by reposting an AI-generated image of a toaster in a bikini that he said he “couldn’t stop laughing” about.
Doe’s lawsuit, overseen by Judge Nathanael Cousins, claims “xAI and its founder Elon Musk chose to capitalize and profit from predators’ appetite for non-consensual sexual images and videos of real people, including children.”
Musk’s sharing of the toaster-in-a-bikini image “triggered a slew of Grok-generated nonconsensual sexualized content,” the lawsuit alleged. “Many of the images Grok produced during this period were sexualized images of children.”
In a separate lawsuit filed in July, xAI challenged Minnesota’s ban on apps and websites used to digitally undress people, arguing that the law is overly broad and unfairly penalizes companies. xAI said in that lawsuit that its terms of service and usage policies prohibit using Grok to undress people or depict them sexually.
Earlier this year, xAI sued a Texas man after his arrest on suspicion of sexually exploiting a minor. The company alleged the man used Grok to create child sexual abuse material.
Doe’s lawsuit said she was in pre-school when her rapist began posting imagery online of her being sexually abused, and the photos and videos have been circulating on the internet ever since, her lawsuit said.
Police have found child sexual abuse imagery of Doe on X, and the Canadian Centre for Child Protection has found on the platform AI-generated child pornography depicting her, the lawsuit claims.
“xAI, using Grok, has generated images depicting (Doe) and the child pornography series in which she is the victim,” the lawsuit alleges.
Grok’s alleged generation of imagery of Doe “compounded” the harms she already suffers from having child pornography of her in circulation, the lawsuit said.