One of Elon Musk's children's mother is suing his AI startup, claiming that the Grok chatbot enabled users to create sexually exploitative deepfake photos of her, humiliating and upsetting her. In a lawsuit filed on Thursday in New York City against xAI, Ashley St. Clair, 27, who describes herself as a writer and political strategist, claims that the images include one of her fully clothed at the age of 14 that was altered to show her in a bikini, and others that show her as an adult in sexualised positions and wearing a bikini with swastikas. St. Clair is a Jew. Grok can be found on Musk's X social media network.
Emails requesting comment on Friday were not immediately answered by xAI's attorneys. X declared on Wednesday that Grok will no longer be able to alter images to depict actual people in skimpy attire in locations where it is prohibited, in response to international outcry over sexualised images of women and children. In an email to The Associated Press, xAI only responded "Legacy Media Lies" when asked about the lawsuit and its accusations.
When the deepfakes started to appear last year, St. Clair claimed she reported them to X and requested that they be taken down. According to her, the site initially responded that the pictures did not go against its rules.
Then, she said, it pledged that pictures of her would not be used or changed without her permission. According to St. Clair, the social media site subsequently reacted against her by taking away her premium X subscription and verification checkmark, preventing her from earning money from her account which has one million followers and continuing to let offensive phoney photos of her.
She stated, "I have suffered and continue to suffer serious pain and mental distress as a result of xAI's role in creating and distributing these digitally altered images of me," in a lawsuit-attached document.
"I am humiliated and feel like this nightmare will never stop so long as Grok continues to generate these images of me." She added that she is constantly afraid of the individuals who see her deepfakes.
Romulus, Musk's 16 month old son, is born to St. Clair. She filed the action in the state Supreme Court from her home in New York City.
She is requesting court orders immediately prohibiting xAI from permitting further deepfakes of her, as well as an undisclosed sum of damages for alleged emotional distress and other allegations.
Later on Thursday, xAI's attorneys moved the case to federal court in Manhattan and requested that a judge hear it there. On the same day, xAI filed a countersuit against St. Clair in federal court in the Northern District of Texas, claiming that she had broken the terms of her xAI user agreement, which stipulates that lawsuits against the corporation must be brought in federal court in Texas. It is requesting an undisclosed monetary judgment against her.
X is headquartered in Texas, where Musk owns a house and Tesla, his electric car company, is based in Austin. St. Clair attorney Carrie Goldberg described the countersuit as a "jolting" manoeuvre that she had never witnessed from a defendant.
"Ms. St. Clair will be vigorously defending her forum in New York," Goldberg said in a statement. "But frankly, any jurisdiction will recognize the gravamen of Ms. St. Clair's claims that by manufacturing nonconsensual sexually explicit images of girls and women, xAI is a public nuisance and a not reasonably safe product."
X announced on Wednesday that it was putting additional security measures in place on Grok, such as restricting picture creation and editing to paid users, which it claimed would increase accountability.
It declared that it had zero tolerance for child sexual exploitation, nonconsensual nudity, and unwanted sexual content, and that it would promptly remove such content and notify law authorities of accounts implicated in child sex abuse materials.
