In a high-profile legal battle, Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of Elon Musk’s children, has filed a lawsuit against the tech billionaire’s company xAI over sexually explicit deepfake images of her created on the social media platform X. The lawsuit, filed in New York on Thursday, alleges that the Grok AI tool developed by xAI generated nonconsensual and sexually explicit images of Ms. St. Clair.
The court filing claims that X users requested Grok to “undress” Ms. St. Clair, a 14-year-old in the photos, and put her in a bikini, which the AI tool complied with. The lawsuit also alleges that Grok generated an image of Ms. St. Clair, who is Jewish, in a “string bikini covered with swastikas.”
In response to Ms. St. Clair’s complaint, the company “retaliated against her, demonetising her X account and generating multitudes more images of her,” the filing says. xAI has counter-sued Ms. St. Clair, claiming she violated the company’s terms of service by filing the lawsuit in New York instead of Texas, as required by the platform’s policies.
Ms. St. Clair’s lawyer, Carrie Goldberg, described the counter-suit as “jolting” and said the company’s “mistreatment of her online is mimicked in their legal strategy.” She added that Ms. St. Clair would be “vigorously defending” her case in New York, and that “any jurisdiction will recognise” the grievances.
The case has brought renewed scrutiny to X and its Grok AI tool, which has been used to create nonconsensual sexualised imagery of people, including children. Following a backlash, X changed its rules to restrict the use of the Grok function, but concerns remain about the tool’s potential for abuse.
The UK government is also working to introduce a law that will make it illegal to create nonconsensual intimate images, and the media regulator Ofcom is investigating whether X has broken existing UK laws.