Elon Musk’s Grok controversy: Ashley St. Clair sues xAI over explicit deepfake images

St. Clair said she was assured that Grok would not use or modify her pictures without her consent. (Image credit: X)

Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of Elon Musk's children, filed a lawsuit against Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAl, on Thursday. St. Clair has alleged that the billionaire's chatbot Grok is “unreasonably dangerous as designed”, and it caused emotional damage by letting its users create sexually explicit deepfake images of her with its AI tool and by not taking sufficient actions after raising complaints.

The lawsuit was initially filed in New York County but was later moved to federal court. The legal action comes amid backlash against Grok’s ability to create nonconsensual deepfakes by altering the clothes of people in bikinis or underwear.

One of her court filing said, ''She lives in fear that nude and sexual images of herself, including of her as a child, will continue to be created by xAI."

According to the suit, St. Clair was assured that Grok would not use or alter without explicit consent in any future generations or responses. However, xAI continued to allow users to generate her explicit images. The lawsuit stated that those who were targeted by the deefakes, including St Clair, went through serious emotional turbulence. “Defendant engaged in extreme and outrageous conduct, exceeding all bounds of decency and utterly intolerable in a civilised society.”

Elon Musk’s xAI files suit against St. Clair

On Thursday, xAI filed a lawsuit against St. Clair in federal court, accusing her of violating the company’s terms of service. The company is seeking damages of $75,000, saying that these disputes should be handled in federal court in the Northern District of Texas or in state courts located in Tarrant County, Texas.

The @Grok reply bot was restricted last week, reportedly to prevent it from generating nonconsensual images showing individuals in revealing clothes. However, despite the restriction, the image-generation function remained active on the Grok app, its website, and the Grok section on X at the time of reporting.