Elon Musk’s Grok AI kicked off a massive scandal over the past month when users started using it to digitally undress both adults and even children, triggering a widespread outcry and wave of criticism.
The fallout led Musk’s social media platform, X, to announce that it was implementing “technical measures” to prevent users from using the AI to undress real people or place them in revealing clothing like bikinis — once again highlighting the billionaire’s explosively fast-and-loose approach to content moderation.
The changes, however, appear to have done little to address the issue. Paid subscribers will continue to have the ability to create and edit Grok images, prompting criticism from experts.
The damage is hitting close to home for Musk. Ashley St. Clair, a conservative influencer who had a child with Musk, is now suing xAI, accusing it of allowing users to generate lewd pictures of her.
“She lives in fear that nude and sexual images of herself, including of her as a child, will continue to be created by xAI and that she will not be safe from the people who consume these images,” reads a legal filing quoted by the Wall Street Journal.
The lawsuit was filed on Thursday in New York County and has since been moved to federal court.
“This is one extremely impacted woman taking a stance,” St. Cair’s lawyer Carrie Goldberg said in a statement. “The intention of the lawsuit is to deter this dehumanizing treatment by xAI for all of the public.”
Goldberg alleges that Grok was used to generate lewd images of St. Clair as a 14-year-old child and posing in sexually explicit ways as an adult. The influencer, who is Jewish, was also allegedly depicted wearing a swastika-covered bikini, and with a tattoo that read “Elon’s w**re.”
The suit accused Musk’s company of allowing the images to stay online for over a week. Even after labeling her responses to the images with a content warning, the images themselves allegedly stayed up.
The lawsuit also claims that xAI found “no violations” when she reported the offending images.
St. Clair’s relationship with Musk has been rocky, to say the least. She is only one of several mothers of Musk’s 14 children. As the Wall Street Journal reported last year, St. Clair has since revealed how Musk offered her $15 million, plus a monthly $100,000 in support, to keep her from publicizing the fact that she had birthed his child.
Beyond enabling the generation of sexualized images of St. Clair, Grok has also been used to depict horrific violence against real women and accurately dox the home addresses of everyday people.
The horrific trend has proven immensely unpopular. A recent survey found that a staggering 97 percent of respondents said that AI tools shouldn’t be allowed to generate sexually explicit content of children. 96 percent said the tool shouldn’t be able to generate “undressed” images of them in underwear.
“The continued ease of access to sophisticated nudification tools clearly demonstrates that X isn’t taking the issue of online violence against women and girls seriously enough,” End Violence Against Women Coalition head of policy and campaigns Rebecca Hitchen told The Guardian.
“The truth is Musk and the tech sector simply do not prioritise safety or dignity in the products they create,” Fawcett Society chief executive Penny East added. “It’s a pretty low bar for women to expect that they can converse online without men undressing them. And yet seemingly even that is impossible.”
More on Grok: Opposition to Elon Musk’s AI Stripping Clothing Off Children Is Nearly Universal, Polling Shows
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