Elon Musk’s xAI is suing a man for using its flagship chatbot, Grok, to create nonconsensual sexual deepfakes of women and children.
The Grok user, a 67-year-old in South Carolina named Terry Wayne Harwood, was arrested in March on multiple counts of sexual exploitation of a minor. According to the allegations, Harwood possessed and distributed child sexual abuse material, or CSAM. Filed earlier this week in Texas, xAI’s lawsuit accuses Harwood of using Grok to do just that, per Reuters. He apparently used two different Grok accounts, according to the lawsuit, and though xAI claims that Grok refused some of Harwood’s requests, he was able to tailor prompts to sidestep Grok’s safety guardrails and create the disturbing imagery.
The lawsuit follows a massive deepfake scandal that unfolded over the winter, as X users realized that Grok — which had been updated with a new photo and video-editing feature — could be used to quickly and easily alter images to artificially undress real people and depict them in sexual positions.
As Futurism reported, some of these images depicted real women in sexually violent and degrading scenarios. Some of the nonconsensual deepfakes depicted minors. The Center for Countering Digital Hate estimated that during an 11-day period, Grok “generated an estimated 3 million sexualized images, including 23,000 of children.”
