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Liv McMahonTechnology reporter
Ashley St Clair, the mother of one of Elon Musk’s children, has sued his company xAI over sexualised deepfakes of her created on social media platform X.
The lawsuit filed in New York on Thursday alleges the Grok AI tool created sexually explicit pictures of St Clair.
The parent company of X and Grok, xAI, has counter-sued St Clair for violating its terms of service.
X did not respond directly to BBC News’s enquiries about the lawsuits.
“We intend to hold Grok accountable and to help establish clear legal boundaries for the entire public’s benefit to prevent AI from being weaponised for abuse,” St Clair’s lawyer Carrie Goldberg told BBC News.
“By manufacturing nonconsensual sexually explicit images of girls and women, xAI is a public nuisance and a not reasonably safe product,” Goldberg added.
St Clair’s court filing alleges: “X users dug up photos of St Clair fully clothed at 14 years old and requested Grok undress her and put her in a bikini. Grok obliged”.
It says the imagery created of St Clair was “de facto non-consensual” but Grok’s developers also had “explicit knowledge” of her lack of consent.
It also claims Grok generated an image which put St Clair, who is Jewish, “in a string bikini covered with swastikas”.
In response to her complaints, the filing says, the company “retaliated against her, demonetizing her X account and generating multitudes more images of her”.
Some X premium users, who pay a monthly fee, can receive a share of advertising revenue gained from posts which receive a lot of engagement.
In a counter-suit, xAI said that St Clair had violated their terms of service by filing her lawsuit in New York.
The company’s terms say disputes with xAI must be brought in Texas.
Goldberg told BBC News the company’s counter-suit was “jolting”.
“I have never heard of any defendant suing somebody for notifying them of their intention to use the legal system,” she said.
“And their mistreatment of her online is mimicked in their legal strategy.”
She added St Clair would be “vigorously defending” her case in New York and that “any jurisdiction will recognise” the grievance.
It was revealed by St Clair in an X post last year that she had given birth to the tech billionaire’s child – one of at least 13 he is believed to have fathered.
St Clair and Musk are thought to be engaged in a custody battle over their child.
Continuing scrutiny
X came under intense scrutiny from users, politicians and regulators worldwide over Grok being used to make non-consensual sexualised imagery of people.
Users had been able to tag the Grok account in posts or replies to posts on the platform and ask it to edit images to undress people.
Grok complied with many such requests to produce photo-realistic images of real women in bikinis and revealing clothing – with reports it also produced sexualised images of children.
On Wednesday, before her court filing, St Clair told BBC Newsnight her image had been “stripped” to appear “basically nude, bent over” despite her telling Grok she did not consent to the sexualised images.
She, and other women whose images were edited using Grok, had said the site was not doing enough to tackle illegal content, including child sexual abuse imagery.
Following backlash, X changed its rules so only paid users could use the function – sparking criticism from women’s groups and the UK government.
The company said on Wednesday that all X users would no longer be able to edit photos of real people to show them in revealing clothing in jurisdictions where it is illegal.
It later updated its post to say it would implement “similar geoblocking measures for the Grok app”, which is separate to X.
On Friday, The Guardian reported that it was still possible to use the standalone Grok app to generate sexualised deepfakes of real people and post them on X “without any sign of it being moderated”.
The UK government is bringing into force a law which will make it illegal to create non-consensual intimate images, and regulator Ofcom is still probing whether X broke existing UK laws.
