Child sexual abuse survivor alleges Elon Musk’s AI chatbot used photos of her to generate new illegal images

A survivor of child sexual abuse has sued Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, alleging that its chatbot used pictures of her abuse to generate new illegal pornographic images that depict her.

“Using real images of Plaintiff and class members, Grok generated child pornography depicting Plaintiff and class members,” states the complaint, which was filed last week in a US district court in California.

Attorneys for the plaintiff, who is listed as Jane Doe in the case to protect her identity, accuse xAI of both generating CSAM of their client and of ingesting child sexual abuse images depicting her into the company’s datasets after new images were publicly posted.

The lawsuit alleges that xAI ignored industry-standard methods of safeguarding against sexual abuse material, resulting in AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) appearing and spreading on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter.

Though Musk denied he was aware Grok had ever produced “any naked underage images” in January, his company sued two of its own users in late August who are facing criminal charges for allegedly doing just that. xAI wants the two men to pay the costs of lawsuits their victims have filed against the company.

The case deviates from several other child sexual abuse-related lawsuits against xAI by accusing the company’s AI of using pre-existing CSAM to produce and distribute AI-generated images of child sexual abuse. Previous suits, such as a case involving a group of Tennessee teenagers, accuse Grok of taking non-explicit photos of minors and using them to generate child sexual abuse material, most often by removing their clothing.

The distinction of using pre-existing CSAM is notable because law enforcement and child protection organizations frequently give those illegal materials a kind of digital fingerprint – known as a hash – which allows them to track images and videos when they appear online. In this case, attorneys for the plaintiff stated that the Canadian Centre for Child Protection used images’ fingerprints to identify AI-generated CSAM on X that depicted their client.

The plaintiff in the case was pre-school-aged when she was repeatedly raped and forced to produce CSAM material by an adult man, according to the complaint. That series of CSAM has been in circulation online for about 20 years, attorneys for the plaintiff said, and is extremely well known to both authorities and child protection groups.

“The difference here between many criminal cases that you’ll see with AI-generated material is that you cannot prove that the kid in the material is real,” Margaret Mabie, an attorney for the plaintiff, said. “But here, because you can associate it with the series, we know that it is an identifiable victim who is still alive and was a real child in the photo.”

Neither xAI or SpaceX, which acquired the company in February, returned requests for comment regarding the lawsuit. SpaceX went public earlier this year in an initial public offering that valued the company at about $1.7tn and for a time made Musk the world’s sole trillionaire.

xAI is facing numerous lawsuits accusing the company of creating and distributing child sexual abuse materials. Many of the lawsuits stem from a period at the start of this year when loose safeguards on Grok allowed users to direct it to remove clothing from photos and generate sexualized images on command via X. Musk stated in January that Grok’s NSFW mode was intended to allow “upper body nudity of imaginary adult humans”. The bot generated millions of sexualized images within the span of weeks, including thousands depicting children, according to researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

Although the class-action suit filed last week focuses on its unnamed lead plaintiff, the complaint states that the class may consist of “at least thousands of minors” who experienced similar harms. The use of AI to produce child sexual abuse material presents a new realm of threats to the safety and mental health of victims, attorneys said, exposing them to unforeseen harm and retraumatizing them with each new AI-generated image.

“The problem here is that at least for our client, for the past 20 years, the universe of images of them was finite,” Mabie said. “The fear now is that new criminal acts, new offensive behavior, new ideas of what can be done to them can now be created using AI. They can generate new abuse.”

The Canadian Centre for Child Protection declined to comment on the case.