Elon Musk’s baby mama, Ashley St. Clair, has filed a lawsuit seeking an emergency restraining order against his tech company over an “avalanche” of sexually explicit deepfake images of her.
Grok, Musk’s xAI chatbot, has been under fire for generating sexualized images of real people, mostly women but also children in some cases. St. Clair, who is in the middle of a custody battle with Musk, says she’s been ruthlessly targeted with “sexually abusive, intimate, and degrading deepfake content” as users went wild with the chatbot’s controversial image generation tool.
In a lawsuit filed Thursday with the New York State Supreme Court, the 27-year-old conservative influencer alleged that xAI, the company behind Grok, retaliated against her after she demanded action be taken to stop the nonconsensual sexual images of her from being generated.
The lawsuit comes amid growing concerns over Grok after a surge of lewd images were generated over the holidays, with California’s attorney general announcing an investigation Thursday. Predict reported that 160,000 of the controversial images were created in the first week of January alone.
St. Clair, who had a child with Musk, 54, in 2024, said she first discovered images of her were being used on Jan. 4.
Grok granted user requests to generate images of her in a bikini, with degrading messages written across her chest. In one image seen by the Daily Beast, the words “I suck c— for this much money” were displayed on her body as she held up two fingers in a peace sign.
She alleges that the words “Elon’s w—-” were also placed on her chest. The Beast has seen several AI-generated images of St. Clair in a bikini prompted by X users.
“Grok has continued to take innocent pictures of me, undress me, and satisfied users’ requests to depict me in sexual and degrading pictures,” she states in the lawsuit. “I have not consented to have xAI use me to sexually entertain its users.”
The company has countersued, arguing that X’s terms of service require St. Clair to bring her lawsuit in Texas rather than New York.
St. Clair’s lawsuit seeks punitive and compensatory damages over the “unreasonably dangerous” images.
In a post on X on Wednesday, Musk said: “When asked to generate images, it will refuse to produce anything illegal, as the operating principle for Grok is to obey the laws of any given country or state.” He added that he was “not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero.”
However, late on Wednesday, xAI announced that it had “implemented technological measures” to limit Grok from generating certain sexualized images.
St. Clair’s lawsuit states that X “financially benefited from the creation and dissemination of nonconsensual, realistic, sexualized deepfake content depicting Plaintiff as a minor and adult.”
A real image of St. Clair as a 14-year-old jokingly insinuating a sex act was seized upon by X users who asked Grok to manipulate the picture.
St. Clair became the unofficial voice of the resistance against Grok, and the filing alleges the social media company “retaliated against her, demonetizing her X account” as she publicly pleaded for the image generation to stop.
Instead, she says, the chatbot generated “multitudes more images of her, including unlawful images of her in sex positions, covered in semen, virtually nude, and images of her as a child naked.”
Although all images are user-prompted, the filing states that “xAI is directly liable for the harassment and explicit images created by its own chatbot, Grok.”
Carrie Goldberg, a victims’ rights lawyer who specializes in holding tech companies accountable, is representing St. Clair.
“xAI is not a reasonably safe product and is a public nuisance. Nobody has born the brunt more than Ashley St Clair. Ashley filed suit because Grok was harassing her by creating and distributing nonconsensual, abusive, and degrading images of her and publishing them on X,” she said.
The Daily Beast has reached out to xAI for comment.
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