Three Tennessee teenagers have filed a class action lawsuit against Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, alleging its large language model powered an app that was used to make nonconsensual nude and sexually explicit images and videos of them when they were girls.
“Like a rag doll brought to life through the dark arts, this [AI-generated] child can be manipulated into any pose, however sick, however fetishized, however unlawful. To the viewer, the resulting video appears entirely real,” reads the complaint. “For the child, her identifying features will now forever be attached to a video depicting her own child sexual abuse.”
While the perpetrator didn’t use xAI’s chatbot, Grok or the social media platform X (also owned by xAI), the lawsuit claims that the perpetrator relied on an unnamed app that used xAI’s algorithm, citing law enforcement.
The plaintiffs accused xAI of deliberately licensing its technology to app makers, often outside the U.S. “In this way, xAI could attempt to outsource the liability of their incredibly dangerous tool,” said the complaint.
The lawsuit is the first in which xAI has been sued by underage people depicted in child sexual abuse material its model allegedly generated. xAI’s image generation tools have been implicated in the production of millions of sexualized images of people over the past year. Influencer Ashley St. Clair, who has a child with Musk, sued the company earlier this year for AI-produced images on X depicting her nude when she was a teenager.
According to the class action complaint, the perpetrator who made the sexualized images had a “close and friendly relationship” with one of the plaintiffs, and used photos the plaintiff sent to him as well as photos he gathered in a yearbook and on social media to make the images and videos. One video depicted one plaintiff “undressing until she was entirely nude.” the complaint alleged. The plaintiffs were disturbed by how lifelike the images and videos were. What’s more, the material was not labelled as AI-generated, according to the complaint.
The perpetrator also made sexually explicit material of 18 other people, and traded them for images of other people online, the complaint alleged. He was arrested, according to the complaint.
The plaintiffs’ attorney, Vanessa Baehr-Jones, said the teenagers, identified as Jane Does 1, 2 and 3 in the complaint, want to change how AI companies make business decisions about sexually explicit content, “We want to make it one[a business decision] that does not make any business sense anymore,” she said.
The plaintiffs are asking the court for damages for emotional distress and other harms caused by the images.
Apps with so-called nudifying functions have existed for years in the shadows of the internet. But last year, major AI companies including Google, OpenAI and xAI updated their image generation tools in a way that allows users to strip people down to bikinis. But the images made by Google and OpenAI include digital watermarks that disclose their AI origin. So far, xAI has not adopted such a standard.
xAI did not respond to a request for comment.
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