Elon Musk's SpacexAI faces another lawsuit from child sexual abuse survivor

Elon Musk's SpacexAI (formerly xAI) is facing another lawsuit over Grok's nonconsensual deepfake features.

The proposed nationwide class action lawsuit, filed today, alleges that the AI company trained its chatbot on data sets containing child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) featuring real children. SpacexAI did not adequately "block explicit content, prevent nonconsensual sexualized deepfakes of real people, and filter abusive material out of their training datasets," the lawsuit claims.

The lead plaintiff, a victim of childhood sexual violence and CSAM referred to as Jane Doe, claims images depicting her assault were used to train Grok and that the chatbot generated new sexually explicit images of her based on the material. It also claims her likeness inspired other digitally-generated images of minors.

"Our client has lived for nearly two decades knowing that images of the worst thing that ever happened to her are circulating among predators online, and that they can resurface at any moment," Sarah London, counsel for Doe, said in a statement. "xAI must be held responsible for knowingly training its models on images of the horrific abuse she suffered, and on the abuse images of every other survivor in this class."  

CSAM is verified and stored by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) as part of ongoing cases and to prevent further dissemination. Images are converted into unique digital signatures, or fingerprints, and stored on what is known as a Hash List. Hash lists are used by internet service providers to automatically detect CSAM without needing to reference original materials.

This is one of several class action lawsuits brought against the company for the chatbot's controversial "nudify" features and alleged role in generating CSAM, following an international child exploitation scandal that led several countries to temporarily suspend access to the AI tool.

In January, a woman filed a proposed class action lawsuit citing emotional distress caused by X users who used Grok to digitally alter photos of her into sexually revealing outfits. The lawsuit alleges SpacexAI created "a generative artificial intelligence chatbot that humiliates and sexually exploits women and girls by undressing them and posing them in sexual positions in deepfake images publicly posted on X."

In March, three teenagers sued the company for Grok's role in generating thousands of sexually explicit images of them as minors, after being notified of the images by law enforcement. That lawsuit was expanded earlier this month, adding two additional plaintiffs in an updated claim that SpacexAI did not effectively report instances of CSAM to NCMEC, which is mandated by law. The lawsuit also mentions Stability AI, the makers of the popular text-to-image model Stable Diffusion, as an additional defendant.