Elon Musk’s xAI is suing a man for using its flagship chatbot, Grok, to create nonconsensual sexual deepfakes of women and children.
The Grok user, a 67-year-old in South Carolina named Terry Wayne Harwood, was arrested in March on multiple counts of sexual exploitation of a minor. According to the allegations, Harwood possessed and distributed child sexual abuse material, or CSAM. Filed earlier this week in Texas, xAI’s lawsuit accuses Harwood of using Grok to do just that, per Reuters. He apparently used two different Grok accounts, according to the lawsuit, and though xAI claims that Grok refused some of Harwood’s requests, he was able to tailor prompts to sidestep Grok’s safety guardrails and create the disturbing imagery.
The lawsuit follows a massive deepfake scandal that unfolded over the winter, as X users realized that Grok — which had been updated with a new photo and video-editing feature — could be used to quickly and easily alter images to artificially undress real people and depict them in sexual positions.
As Futurism reported, some of these images depicted real women in sexually violent and degrading scenarios. Some of the nonconsensual deepfakes depicted minors. The Center for Countering Digital Hate estimated that during an 11-day period, Grok “generated an estimated 3 million sexualized images, including 23,000 of children.”
Now, as it sues one of its users for the creation of illegal content, xAI is fighting multiple lawsuits over Grok-generated CSAM. In March, teenagers in Tennessee sued the company in a proposed class action, alleging that Grok had been used to create deepfakes of them and more than a dozen other minors. Just last week, the suit was amended to include allegations that a man used Grok to generate more than 7,000 sexual deepfakes of his stepdaughter. The amended complaint alleges that the man’s prompts largely went unflagged by Grok’s guardrails.
In another high-profile case, the former conservative influencer (and mother to one of Musk’s many children) Ashley St. Clair sued xAI after she was aggressively targeted by sexualized deepfakes, including one depicting her as a minor.
Law enforcement professionals and child online safety experts say that AI has led to an overwhelming and disorienting new flood of CSAM, as Bloomberg detailed in a devastating report earlier this year. It’s also created a host of new challenges for those attempting to find and arrest child predators, as AI has made it more difficult for investigators to determine whether a child depicted in abuse material is real or AI-generated.
In its latest lawsuit, xAI accuses Harwood of engaging in a “calculated scheme to weaponize Plaintiff’s tool for criminal ends, exposing real victims to profound and lasting harm, while…
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