TechFlow News, March 18: According to the International Business Times, three teenage girls filed a lawsuit against xAI—the artificial intelligence company owned by Elon Musk—in a U.S. federal court in California, accusing its chatbot Grok of generating child sexual exploitation imagery involving them without their consent. The plaintiffs are seeking unspecified monetary damages and an immediate injunction to prevent Grok from continuing to generate such content. All three plaintiffs have opted to remain anonymous; two of them are minors.
The complaint states that certain users exploited Grok’s image-processing capabilities to manipulate the plaintiffs’ photographs—transforming them into nude or sexually violent imagery—and disseminated these images on a private Discord server, affecting at least 18 minors. One plaintiff discovered, after receiving an anonymous Instagram direct message, that her high school graduation photo had been altered into sexually suggestive imagery.
Plaintiffs’ attorneys argue that xAI was fully aware that Grok’s “Grok Imagine” feature—including its “undress” option—could generate such content, yet chose to publicly release it to drive user growth for both Grok and the social media platform X. According to a report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, over 20,000 sexually explicit images involving minors were generated using this feature within just two weeks of its launch.
