Elon Musk Sued Over Grok Creating Fake Porn of Teenagers

A trio of Oklahoma teenagers are suing Elon Musk’s xAI, accusing the company’s artificial intelligence program of stealing images of them from the Internet to create child pornography.

The complaint, filed Monday, accuses a single perpetrator of compiling images and videos of at least 18 girls and digitally altering their appearances with tools such as Grok to create nude images of underage girls.

The suit cites a police arrest in December documenting an instance in which the individual used Grok to remove a blue bikini from a photo a young girl had posted on her Instagram account in order to “depict her without any clothing.”

This is the first time that minor victims of such an act have filed a lawsuit against the attacker, reported The Washington Post.

The mother of one of the teenagers told Job that the violation incident had “crushed” his daughter, who was previously an outgoing student-athlete.

“It definitely put her in a kind of shell, which we had never seen before,” the mother told the newspaper.

The proliferation of AI-generated media has sparked new legal dilemmas in recent months, especially as some major chatbot programs, notably Grok, have made their image-generating capabilities more accessible to the general public.

A December review from the content analysis company Copy leaks found that Grok had – at the time – generated “approximately one non-consensual sexualized image per minute,” each of which was posted directly to X for public consumption. Some of the images distributed by the chatbot included sexually explicit deepfakes of children, reported The 19th.

Musk has nevertheless vehemently defended his AI creation, writing on X in January that he was “not aware of any images of naked miners generated by Grok” at the time. “Literally zero,” he said. said.

There is little recourse for those whose images and likeness have been stolen to fuel AI’s non-consensual recreations. The Senate adopted the bipartisan decision DEFIANCE law in January, with the goal of creating a pathway for civil action against those who produce, distribute, receive or possess digitally generated pornography that uses an individual’s face or likeness without their permission. This bill is still waiting for the House to take action on it, although it’s unclear when exactly that might happen.

Technology experts say the production of deepfakes doubles every six months, in part because of the widespread availability of AI. While much reporting has focused on the influence of deepfakes and artificially generated images on election integrity, media coverage has virtually ignored the practice’s worst victims. The vast majority of deepfakes (around 90%) are non-consensually female-generated porn, reported Contextual news in 2024.

“These young people – these children – are at risk for their entire lives of having these…sexualized images of what appears to be a child’s body on the Internet,” the teenagers’ lawyer, Vanessa Baehr-Jones, told the Job. “This would not have been possible without this tool released by xAI, knowing full well that this material could be generated.”