Ashley St Clair, mother of Musk’s son, Romulus, sues over ‘pain and mental distress’ caused by fake AI images generated by Grok chatbot.
The mother of one of Elon Musk’s children is suing his artificial intelligence company, saying its Grok chatbot allowed users to generate sexually-exploitative deepfake images of her that have caused her humiliation and emotional distress.
The lawsuit was filed just before California Attorney General Rob Bonta sent a cease-and-desist letter to Musk’s xAI company demanding that it stop the creation and distribution of Grok-generated nonconsensual sexualised imagery.
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“The avalanche of reports detailing this material – at times depicting women and children engaged in sexual activity – is shocking and, as my office has determined, potentially illegal,” Bonta said on Friday.
Ashley St Clair, a writer and political commentator, alleges in a lawsuit filed on Thursday in New York City against xAI that she was the victim of sexualised deepfake images generated by Grok.
St Clair, who is the mother of Musk’s 16-month-old son, Romulus, said she reported the images to Musk’s X social media platform, which hosts Grok, after they began appearing last year and asked that they be removed.
The platform replied that the images did not violate its policies, she said. Then it promised not to allow images of her to be used or altered without her consent. Later, the social platform retaliated against her by removing her premium X subscription and verification checkmark, and continued to allow degrading fake images of her, she said.
“I have suffered and continue to suffer serious pain and mental distress as a result of xAI’s role in creating and distributing these digitally altered images of me,” St Clair said in a document attached to the lawsuit.
“I am humiliated and feel like this nightmare will never stop so long as Grok continues to generate these images of me,” she said.
‘A public nuisance’
On Thursday, lawyers for xAI countersued St Clair in federal court in the Northern District of Texas, alleging she violated the terms of her xAI user agreement that requires lawsuits against the company be filed in federal court in Texas. It is seeking an undisclosed monetary judgement against her.
Carrie Goldberg, a lawyer for St Clair, called the countersuit a “jolting” move that she had never seen by a defendant before.
“Ms St Clair will be vigorously defending her forum in New York,” Goldberg said in a statement.
“But frankly, any jurisdiction will recognise the gravamen of Ms St Clair’s claims – that by manufacturing nonconsensual sexually explicit images of girls and women, xAI is a public nuisance and a not reasonably safe product.”
In an interview with US media earlier this week, St Clair said her battle with Grok was “not just about me”.
“It’s about building systems, AI systems which can produce, at scale, and abuse women and children without repercussions. And there’s really no consequences for what’s happening right now,” she told CNN.
“They are saying ‘we are going to make it illegal, where it’s illegal’. That is absent [of] all morality and, guess what, if you have to add safety after harm, that is not safety at all. That is simply damage control,” she said.
Musk’s Grok is already under scrutiny and facing an international backlash for the creation of explicit deepfake images in the United Kingdom, the European Union, and other jurisdictions, including India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Japan.
Japanese authorities said on Friday they too were probing X over Grok, saying all options were under consideration to prevent the generation of inappropriate images.
