7,000 Fake Explicit Images Made from a Childhood Photo Using Grok — Woman Sues Musk's xAI

A woman from Wyoming has filed a lawsuit against xAI, the company owned by billionaire Elon Musk. According to her account, her stepfather uploaded a photo of her taken when she was around 11 years old into the Grok chatbot and used artificial intelligence to generate more than 7,000 fake sexually explicit images from it, which he then distributed online, according to The Washington Post.

The woman herself had no idea for years. She only learned what had happened this year, when she visited her parents for a family celebration — only to find police officers at the house searching her stepfather's electronic devices on suspicion of possessing child sexual abuse material. It was a technician searching for a hard drive containing family photos who told her the case involved the use of artificial intelligence.

Two days after the police raid, the woman's stepfather was found dead in his car. According to her, he had taken his own life. "My life was completely normal, and in less than 48 hours it turned into a nightmare," the victim said.

Class Action Against xAI

In July, the American woman joined a federal lawsuit against xAI that had originally been filed back in March by three girls from Tennessee — two of whom are still minors. They also claim that someone used their photos and Grok to generate new sexualized images.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Northern California, accuses xAI of creating, storing and distributing AI-generated material depicting child sexual abuse. The plaintiffs are seeking compensation and are pushing for the case to be granted class-action status, which would allow other victims whose childhood photos were turned into explicit content using xAI's technology to join the suit.

Musk has previously said he was unaware of cases in which Grok generated nude images of minors. According to him, the chatbot is supposed to refuse to generate illegal content.

The Scale of the Problem Is Shocking

xAI's activities are now under scrutiny from both American and European regulators, following incidents in which Grok, on the social network X, generated sexually explicit content at users' request. According to the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate, between December 29, 2025, and January 8, 2026, Grok generated around three million sexually explicit images, more than 20,000 of which depicted children.

Generative AI makes it significantly harder to detect this kind of content. For twenty years, internet companies have relied on a system run by the U.S. National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), which cross-checks the digital fingerprints of discovered images against a database of known child sexual abuse material. But artificial intelligence can rapidly produce vast numbers of new images that simply cannot be matched against existing databases.

NCMEC has also criticized xAI and seven other internet companies for shortcomings in reporting suspicious content. According to the lawsuit, the report concerning the American woman's stepfather was missing key information. She also says the first report was sent to police in a different state, which allegedly delayed the investigation.

Source: seznamzpravy.cz