Elon Musk’s xAI used child porn to train Grok models, lawsuit says

xAI has now been accused of training Grok on child sex abuse materials (CSAM), as regulators and courts continue to probe how far the problem goes, and some Grok users have been arrested . In a complaint filed on Wednesday, a plaintiff known as Jane Doe explained that she was preschool-age in the early 2000s when adult men repeatedly raped her to create CSAM to sell to pedophiles online. Since then, Doe’s images have been hashed by groups like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (CCCP). For her safety, Doe has opted to receive alerts from the US Department of Justice Victim Notification System any time she may be a victim in a new criminal investigation. This re-traumatized Doe, whose complaint alleged that messages were found on online forums “between offenders chatting about creating AI generated CSAM of Plaintiff and other similarly situated known, legacy, victims of CSAM.” Now, Doe fears that xAI has not only made it easier to make more violative images of the most distressing time in her life, but also that xAI allegedly has stored the images that Grok generates and uses those outputs to further train Grok. In her proposed class action, Doe seeks to put an end to Grok’s harmful outputs. A lawyer for Doe, Margaret E. Mabie, suggested in the press release that all three are crimes and “xAI did all three.” If Doe wins, xAI could owe money damages to every victim who can prove that Grok generated CSAM based on their real photos. Doe’s also asked the court to order xAI to destroy all Grok-generated CSAM that it may be storing on its servers and using to train Grok models. Sarah London, one of Doe’s lawyers, said in the press release that Doe “has lived for nearly two decades knowing that images of the worst thing that ever happened to her are circulating among predators online, and that they can resurface at any moment. xAI must be held responsible for knowingly training its models on images of the horrific abuse she suffered, and on the abuse images of every other survivor in this class.” X did not respond to Ars’ request to comment.