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A group of three teenage girls, two of whom are minors, filed a lawsuit on Monday against Elon Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence company alleging that its Grok image generator used photos of them to produce and distribute child sexual abuse material. The class-action lawsuit is the first filed by minors following Grok’s rampant generation of nonconsensual nude images earlier this year.
“xAI chose to profit off the sexual predation of real people, including children, despite knowing full well the consequences of creating such a dangerous product,” Vanessa Baehr-Jones, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said in a statement.
The suit, which was brought by three Tennessee teenagers but filed in California, where xAI is headquartered, details how the girls discovered that nude, AI-altered images of them were uploaded to a Discord server and shared online without their knowledge.
After they alerted law enforcement to the images, according to the complaint, police arrested a suspect later that month and found child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on his phone that was allegedly produced using xAI’s image and video generation technology.
xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Guardian.
The suit alleges that the CSAM was created using a third-party app that licensed and relied on Grok’s AI to produce the material. The Washington Post first reported on the case.
The lawsuit joins several other legal actions and international investigations into xAI over its creation and dissemination of nonconsensual sexualized images, including another lawsuit from the mother of one of Musk’s children and a formal European Union inquiry. At the peak of the scandal, researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate calculated that Grok had created about 3m sexualized images in less than two weeks – around 23,000 of which depicted children.
Musk has previously denied that Grok has been used to produce CSAM, claiming in January that he was “not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero.”
He also alleged that Grok would not generate any illegal images, and that its operating principle was to follow local laws.
In the complaint, filed on Monday, lawyers for the teenage plaintiffs detailed how the girls discovered that AI-altered nude images of them were being circulated online. One girl, referred to as Jane Doe 1, received a message on Instagram in December from an anonymous user, who alerted her that someone in her social circle had uploaded a series of deepfake videos and images to a Discord server that depicted her and other girls from her high school naked and in sexualized positions, according to the complaint.
Jane Doe noticed that three of the photos appeared to be AI-altered images of photographs taken while she was a minor, including one from her school’s homecoming celebration. Criminal investigators later also discovered that the images had been shared on the messaging app Telegram, according to the complaint, where they were allegedly being used as a currency to barter for other child sexual abuse material.
“The images showed her entire body, including her genitals, without any clothes. The video depicted her undressing until she was entirely nude,” the complaint states.
The other plaintiffs in the suit discovered in February that similar CSAM material featuring them had also been generated via AI and shared online, with the suit seeking damages against xAI for the reputational and mental health harms resulting from the images.
“Watching my daughter have a panic attack after realizing that these images were created and distributed without any hope of recalling them was heartbreaking,” the mother of one of the girls said via a representative.
Although the complaint alleges that the images were created using a third-party application accessing Grok’s technology rather than directly on the X website or Grok app, the complaint argues that this use still requires xAI’s servers and that xAI profits from licensing its technology to these apps.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs accuse xAI of effectively off-loading liability through its licensing structure and lack of oversight.
