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Ashley St Clair, the influencer and mother of one of Elon Musk’s children, has sued the billionaire’s AI company, accusing its Grok chatbot of creating fake sexual imagery of her without her consent.
In the lawsuit, filed in New York state court, St Clair alleged that xAI’s Grok first created an AI-generated or altered image of her in a bikini earlier this month.
St Clair claims she made a request to xAI that no further such images be made, but nevertheless “countless sexually abusive, intimate, and degrading deepfake content of St. Clair [were] produced and distributed publicly by Grok”.
In one case, a photo of St Clair from when she was 14 years old was altered by Grok to undress her and put her in a bikini, according to the court filing.
St Clair is a conservative influencer with about 1mn followers on X and the mother of one of Musk’s children. The billionaire entrepreneur has espoused pronatalist views, arguing in support of increasing birth rates, and fathered at least 14 children with several different women.
After reporting the images to xAI, St Clair’s account on the X social media platform was stripped of its verification checkmark, premium subscription and ability to monetise her posts, the filing said.
The case has now been moved to federal court. xAI, which runs X, did not respond to a request for comment.
The news comes as xAI and Musk have come under fire over fake sexualised images of women and children, which proliferated on the platform this year, particularly after Musk jokingly shared an AI-altered post of himself in a bikini.
Over the past week, the issue has prompted threats of fines and bans in the EU, UK and France, as well as investigations by the California attorney-general and Britain’s Ofcom regulator. Grok has also been banned in Indonesia and Malaysia.
On Wednesday, xAI took action to restrict the image-generation function on its Grok AI model to block the chatbot from undressing users, insisting that it removed Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) and non-consensual nudity material.
St Clair, who has in recent months been increasingly critical of Musk, is also seeking a temporary restraining order to prevent xAI from generating images that undress her.
“Ms St Clair is humiliated, depressed, fearful for her life, angry and desperately in need of action from this court to protect her against xAI’s facilitation of this unfathomable nightmare,” lawyers wrote in a filing seeking the restraining order.
xAI filed a lawsuit against St Clair in Texas on Thursday, claiming she has breached the company’s terms of service by bringing her lawsuit against the company in a New York court instead of in Texas.
Earlier this week, Musk also said on X that he would be filing for “full custody” of their one-year-old son Romulus, after St Clair apologised for sharing posts critical of transgender people in the past. Musk, who has a transgender child, has repeatedly been critical of transgender people and the rights of trans individuals.
Additional reporting by Kaye Wiggins in New York