Ashley St. Clair, the mother of Mr. Musk’s son Romulus, filed a lawsuit alleging “pain and emotional distress” caused by the fake AI images generated by the Grok chatbot.
The mother of one of Elon Musk’s children is suing Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, claiming its Grok chatbot allowed users to generate sexually exploitative deepfake images that caused her humiliation and emotional distress.
The lawsuit was filed shortly before California Attorney General Rob Bonta sent a cease-and-desist letter to Musk’s xAI company, forcing it to stop producing and distributing non-consensual sexual images generated by Grok.
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“The spate of reports detailing this material, sometimes depicting women and children engaging in sex acts, is shocking and, as determined by my office, potentially illegal,” Bonta said Friday.
Author and political commentator Ashley St. Clair claimed in a lawsuit filed against xAI in New York City on Thursday that she was the victim of sexually charged deepfake images generated by Grok.
St. Clair, the mother of Musk’s 16-month-old son Romulus, said she reported the images to Musk’s social media platform X, which hosts Grok, and asked them to be removed after they started appearing last year.
The platform responded that the image did not violate its policies. He also promised not to use or alter her image without her consent. She said the social platform then retaliated against her by removing her Premium X subscription and verification checkmark, and continued to allow fake images that degraded her.
“I have suffered and continue to suffer significant pain and emotional distress as a result of xAI’s role in the creation and distribution of digitally altered images of me,” St. Clair said in a statement attached to the lawsuit.
“It’s humiliating and I feel like this nightmare will never stop as long as Grok continues to create an image of me,” she said.
“Public nuisance”
On Thursday, xAI’s lawyers countersued St. Clair in the Northern District of Texas, alleging that he violated the terms of the xAI User Agreement, which requires him to sue the company in Texas federal court. The group is seeking an undisclosed monetary judgment against her.
St. Clair City Attorney Carrie Goldberg called the countersuit a “shocking” move the defendants have never seen before.
“Mr. St. Clair will vigorously defend the forum in New York,” Mr. Goldberg said in a statement.
“But, frankly, any jurisdiction would recognize the seriousness of Ms. St. Clair’s argument that xAI is a public nuisance and is not a reasonably safe product by producing non-consensual, sexually explicit images of girls and women.”
In an interview with US media earlier this week, St. Clair said his fight with Grok was “not just about me.”
“It’s about building a system, an AI system, that can produce and abuse women and children at scale without any repercussions. And there’s really no repercussions for what’s going on right now,” she told CNN.
“They say, ‘Where it’s illegal, we’ll make it illegal.’ That doesn’t exist.” [of] All morality, and if you have to add safety after doing harm, it’s not safe at all. It’s just damage control,” she said.
Musk’s Grok is already under intense scrutiny, facing international backlash for creating blatant deepfake images in the United Kingdom, the European Union, and other jurisdictions including India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Japan.
Japanese authorities announced on Friday that they were also investigating X over Grok, and said all options were being considered to prevent the production of inappropriate images.
