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According to boosters of AI, the tech was supposed to usher in an era of unprecedented productivity, leisure time for workers, and scientific discovery. But in reality, it keeps being linked to crimes so ghoulish that they’re almost unbelievable.
In a particularly horrifying example, a man used Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot to generate some 7,000 sexually explicit images of his stepdaughter by feeding the AI a photo of her that was taken when she was 11 years old, a lawsuit alleges.
The allegations, as reported by Ars Technica, were made in a proposed class action lawsuit against xAI — now owned by SpaceX and rebranded as SpaceXAI — which accuses it of building AI tools to “nudify” people without their consent and shielding predators from law enforcement.
According to the suit, brought by a group of girls who say they were victimized by obscene Grok generations, the stepfather’s horrific activity almost went entirely unnoticed by Grok’s safety systems. It failed to flag the countless images depicting incest and rape, per Ars. It was only after a specific prompt for a “gang rape” that it sent a tip to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), who alerted authorities.
But xAI “obstructed” the investigation that followed “at every turn,” the suit alleges. It refused to provide more information on the user behind the requests, including critical identifying details like an IP address. Police tracked down the man anyway, finding a vast collection of AI-generated images of his stepdaughter, identified only as Jane Doe 4. Two days after being released on bail, the man fatally shot himself, upending the young girl’s life even more than he already had.
“Overnight, Jane Doe 4’s entire reality was shattered by the dual tragedies of child sexual exploitation and suicide,” the lawsuit alleged. “Her family was torn apart, and her life became a nightmare.”
Grok’s ability to create sexual deepfakes gained national attention after a several week period in last December and this January when it was used to generate tens of thousands of nonconsensual AI nudes of real women and children. In the aftermath, the firm Copyleaks estimated the bot was generating a nonconsensually sexualized image every single minute. The Center for Counter Digital Hate later estimated that this amounted to around 3,000,000 AI nudes, with more than 23,000 of those images depicting children.
Musk, the CEO and owner of xAI, has denied that Grok has been used to generate CSAM. The company’s immediate response to the outcry was to simply restrict image generation to paying users. Over a week later — as Grok continued to crank out more CSAM and deepfake nudes — xAI said it was implementing stricter guardrails to stop Grok from generating sexual images of real people, without acknowledging the disturbing trend.
The lawsuit also accuses xAI of protecting predators by frustrating law enforcement’s attempts to track them down. In a press release quoted by Ars, the plaintiff’s legal team pointed to NCMEC’s discovery that 90 percent of xAI’s CyberTips weren’t “actionable” because they barely provided information on the flagged users.
“They had everything they needed to help law enforcement stop the person responsible and achieve justice. Instead, they remained silent and allowed this person to use Grok to steal my childhood,” Jane Doe 4 said, per Ars.
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