©Salvador Rios via Unsplash
It allowed "the creation of se.xually explicit images" without their consent. Three young American women are therefore suing xAI, Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, accusing the Grok chatbot of having generated por.nographic images from some of their (real) photos.
The complaint comes after Brussels launched a formal investigation in recent weeks. In the United States, the case could concern more than a thousand victims that are minors, and is linked to the New Year's Eve deepfakes published on X (ex- Twitter), which California is also investigating today.
"xAI chose to profit from the se.xual predation of real people, including children, while being fully aware of the consequences of bringing such a dangerous product to market," said Vanessa Baehr-Jones, attorney for the plaintiffs.
What happened
The teenage girls discovered that content manipulated by artificial intelligence - including deepfake images and videos - was circulating on the net, uploaded to Discord servers and then shared on other platforms, such as Telegram.
In one case, one of the girls allegedly received an anonymous message on Instagram warning her of the existence of content showing her naked and in se.xualized poses, alongside other girls of her age. Some of the images were allegedly generated from photos taken when she was still a minor, including shots from her school's yearbook.
According to the complaint, this content was also used as "currency" in illegal circuits in order to obtain other paedophile material.
Following a report to the authorities, the police arrested a suspect and discovered illegal content on his phone, allegedly generated using tools based on xAI technology. The complaint claims that the material was created via third-party applications using Grok thanks to official licenses. Even if it was not directly produced on the X platform, the system would still rely on xAI's servers, which would benefit from the distribution of its own technology.
Lawyers accuse the company of having, in effect, offloaded its responsibilities onto external developers, without putting in place adequate controls on the use of its tools.
A global (and growing) problem
This case is part of a wider context of investigations and lawsuits targeting xAI for generating se.xualized images without consent. According to some analyses, Grok produced millions of such images in just a few weeks, including thousands involving minors.
In the past, Elon Musk has denied that the system was used to create illegal content, claiming that he was not aware of any images of minors generated by the platform, and that Grok was designed to comply with local legislation.
This case highlights an increasingly urgent issue: the uncontrolled use of artificial intelligence to manipulate images, and the lack of effective safeguards, particularly when the victims are minors.
Source : The Guardian
(©GreenMe.it 2026/Managing editor: Selma Keshkire - The Press Junction/Picture: Salvador Rios via Unsplash)