Three Tennessee plaintiffs, including two minors, sued Elon Musk’s xAI on Monday, alleging that it knowingly designed its Grok image generator to allow people to create sexually explicit content by using real photographs of other people.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Jose, California, seeks class-action status for people in the United States who were “reasonably identifiable” in sexualized images or videos generated by Grok based on real images of themselves.
The artificial intelligence company did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
After an outcry over sexually explicit content generated by the chatbot, xAI said in January that it had blocked all users from editing images of “real people in revealing clothing” and generating images of people in revealing clothing in “jurisdictions where it is illegal.”
Since then, governments and regulators around the world have also launched investigations, imposed bans and required safeguards in a growing effort to curb illegal and offensive material.
The lawsuit claims that xAI failed to “install safeguards to prevent its systems from generating sexual content involving minors.” All three plaintiffs were minors at the time the images were generated.
The plaintiffs allege that their actual images were digitally altered into explicit content and then shared online across platforms, causing emotional distress and creating public nuisance.
They are seeking unspecified damages, legal fees and a court order forcing xAI to stop the alleged practices.
“These are children whose school and family photographs became child sexual abuse material,” plaintiffs’ attorney Annika Martin of Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein said in a statement.
“Elon Musk and xAI deliberately designed Grok to produce sexually explicit content for profit, without regard for children and adults who would be harmed.”
