\u201cIt definitely put her into a little bit of a shell, which we had never seen before,\u201d the mother said.<\/p>\n
The three plaintiffs, including two minors, seek damages for child pornography violations and aim to prevent the company from allowing image editing like that used to alter their photos. Attorneys allege that xAI fostered an environment in which the spread of child sexual abuse material was inevitable, as the technology and the company\u2019s public messaging encouraged people to create explicit images. A \u201cmodel that can create sexualised images of adults cannot be prevented from creating CSAM of minors\u201d, according to the complaint.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese young people \u2013 these children \u2013 are facing a lifetime of having these \u2026 sexualised images of what appears to be a child\u2019s body out there on the internet,\u201d said lawyer Vanessa Baehr-Jones, who is representing the plaintiffs in the proposed class-action suit. \u201cIt wouldn\u2019t have been possible but for this tool that xAI released knowing full well that this material could be generated.\u201d<\/p>\n
Elon Musk, founder of xAI, said he was ‘not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok’ and blamed possible ‘adversarial hacking’. Photo \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n
Musk and xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Musk said in January in a post on X that he was \u201cnot aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero\u201d. The chatbot only follows user requests, he said, and will refuse to produce anything illegal, adding that \u201cadversarial hacking\u201d could lead the tool to act unexpectedly.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf that happens, we fix the bug immediately,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Musk said in a post on X last week that \u201cif it\u2019s allowed in an R-rated movie, it\u2019s allowed\u201d by Grok\u2019s image and video generator tool.<\/p>\n
The lawsuit comes after xAI ignited a firestorm by allowing users to \u201cundress\u201d real subjects in photos through editing features and capabilities unlocked via its Grok Imagine tool and \u201cSpicy\u201d mode. The capabilities allowed users to create sexual and revealing images of real people by depicting them in garments as tiny as a string of dental floss, for example.<\/p>\n
The editing led to the generation of millions of sexualised images, including what researchers said were an estimated 23,000 images appearing to depict children over an 11-day period. Authorities, including the California Attorney-General, the European Commission and Britain\u2019s communications regulator, opened investigations tied to the features.<\/p>\n
In January, xAI said it had rolled back its editing tools in some jurisdictions, after previously limiting image generation to paying users. Grok\u2019s embrace of sexualised material arose as part of an effort by xAI to attract more users to its chatbot, The Post reported last month.<\/p>\n
The suit alleges xAI committed a range of offences, including creating child pornography and launching a feature riddled with design defects, and argues the company knowingly allowed its tools to generate sexual images of minors as part of an effort to monetise its AI.<\/p>\n
The complaint said that editing images of real children to create sexualised images constitutes creating child pornography. US officials have previously said sexually explicit computer-generated depictions of children are illegal.<\/p>\n
According to the complaint, \u201cxAI \u2013 and its founder Elon Musk \u2013 saw a business opportunity: an opportunity to profit off the sexual predation of real people, including children\u201d.<\/p>\n
The students in Tennessee learned of the explicit images late last year, after one of them, identified in the lawsuit as \u201cJane Doe 1\u201d, received a message on Instagram. It said explicit photos of her were spreading on the chat platform Discord.<\/p>\n
The lawsuit said that one of the child sexual abuse images of her originated from a photo of her at her school homecoming in September. Another, depicting her topless, appeared to have been made using a yearbook photo, the lawsuit said. She \u201cwas a minor during the operative time\u201d, the lawsuit said.<\/p>\n
She received a link to a Discord server, \u201cwhich contained images and videos of at least 18 other minor females, many of whom Jane Doe 1 recognised from her school\u201d, according to the lawsuit.<\/p>\n
According to the complaint, police last year opened a criminal investigation into the perpetrator. He was arrested in December, the complaint said, and police searched his phone.<\/p>\n
But the images took on a life of their own, circulating broadly.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn Telegram group chats with hundreds of other users, [the perpetrator traded] her CSAM files for sexually explicit content of other minors,\u201d the lawsuit said.<\/p>\n
Attorneys said they engaged with third-party experts to determine the images had been created by AI and, specifically, Grok. The complaint alleges the perpetrator turned to Grok and other tools that license its capabilities, including apps designed to \u201cundress people\u201d, to manipulate real photos of underage people. Those tools effectively serve as a middleman, attorneys said, bringing Grok\u2019s capabilities to a user who isn\u2019t turning directly to Grok\u2019s website or the X app.<\/p>\n
The lawsuit claims a perpetrator used Grok to digitally ‘undress’ photos taken from social media, including a bikini image from Instagram. Photo \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n
\u201cIn all instances, the real images and videos uploaded into Defendants\u2019 servers were not unlawful [child sexual abuse material] but only became unlawful content after Defendants\u2019 AI morphed the files on xAI servers to produce and distribute CSAM,\u201d according to the complaint.<\/p>\n
By February, the two other plaintiffs, both minors, learned through the criminal investigation that the perpetrator had used their images to create child sexual abuse material as well, according to the lawsuit.<\/p>\n
The consequences of the abuse are likely to follow the students for decades, attorneys said. The plaintiffs, the complaint said, will probably receive National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children notifications for the rest of their lives \u2013 informing them that \u201ccriminal defendants have possessed, received, or distributed CSAM files depicting them\u201d.<\/p>\n
In an interview, Annika K. Martin, the lead counsel in the suit, posed questions she\u2019d ask the xAI founder himself.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs a parent can you imagine your child \u2013 your child\u2019s face \u2013 on images of … depraved actions put into video of grossly sexual behaviour?\u201d she asked. \u201cYour child\u2019s voice on video screaming. Can you imagine that as a parent? Can you imagine that for your child and feel okay with what you\u2019ve done?\u201d<\/p>\n
Sign up to Herald Premium Editor\u2019s Picks<\/a>, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week\u2019s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cIt definitely put her into a little bit of a shell, which we had never seen before,\u201d the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":334035,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[50559,9556,806,13916,682,138,9473,1656,5426,14032,11585,17448,71,7710,27501,5606,9557,440,1362,114622,6178,17449,17444,34700,13631,111,139,69,1118,254,675,29541,17703,26639,10536,1037,10706,672,12214,5536,2846,6859,1316,5537],"class_list":["post-334034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-allege","tag-artificial","tag-as","tag-asked","tag-being","tag-business","tag-chatbot","tag-company","tag-created","tag-daughter","tag-eastern","tag-elon","tag-from","tag-grok","tag-heard","tag-images","tag-intelligence","tag-local","tag-made","tag-minors","tag-mother","tag-musk","tag-musks","tag-naked","tag-never","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-of","tag-photos","tag-police","tag-recalls","tag-sexual","tag-shed","tag-someone","tag-startup","tag-teenage","tag-teens","tag-tennessee","tag-tesla","tag-them","tag-told","tag-when","tag-xai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=334034"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334034\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/334035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=334034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=334034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=334034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}