Three plaintiffs, including two minors, filed a lawsuit on Monday in federal court in California accusing xAI’s Grok chatbot of generating sexualized deepfake images of minor girls using their real photos.
The lawsuit says xAI, the artificial intelligence company owned by billionaire Elon Musk, failed to adopt safeguards used by rival AI companies to prevent image models from generating sexual content involving real people or minors, leaving Grok open to abuse that is hard to contain once the material spreads online.
It alleges xAI publicly promoted Grok’s ability to generate sexualized images or depict real people in revealing clothing, saying that approach helped widen the harm.
The complaint included disturbing details. One plaintiff said unknown people used Grok to turn high school photos of her into fully nude images and post them online after someone contacted her on Instagram and sent her a Discord link containing the fake images of her and other minor girls from her school.
The lawsuit says criminal investigators later told the two other plaintiffs that altered images of them also existed. One image was generated through an outside app built on Grok models, while the other was found on the phone of a person investigators had arrested.
The plaintiffs’ lawyers said the use of outside apps does not absolve xAI of responsibility because those services rely on the company’s technology.
The lawsuit says the three plaintiffs have faced severe psychological distress because of the circulation of the images and the potential impact on their reputations, social relationships, and daily lives. It seeks civil penalties and damages under laws enacted to protect children from exploitation, along with negligence claims against the company.
The case adds to a broader crisis that has surrounded Grok since the start of the year. In January, xAI limited the image-generation feature on X to paying subscribers only after a wave of criticism over the tool’s ability to produce sexualized images of women and children.
