Teenage girls sue Musk’s xAI, accusing Grok tool of creating child sexual abuse material
A group of three teenage girls, two of whom are minors, filed a lawsuit on Monday against Elon Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence company alleging that its Grok image generator used photos of them to produce and distribute child sexual abuse material.The class-action lawsuit is the first filed by minors following Grok’s rampant generation of nonconsensual nude images earlier this year.“xAI chose to profit off the sexual predation of real people, including children, despite knowing full well the consequences of creating such a dangerous product,” Vanessa Baehr-Jones, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said in a statement.The suit, which was brought by three Tennessee teenagers but filed in California, where xAI is headquartered, details how the girls discovered that nude, AI-altered images of them were uploaded to a Discord server and shared online without their knowledge.After they alerted law enforcement to the images, according to the complaint, police arrested a suspect later that month and found child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on his phone that was allegedly produced using xAI’s image and video generation technology.
xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Guardian.The suit alleges that the CSAM was created using a third-party app that licensed and relied on Grok’s AI to produce the material.The Washington Post first reported on the case.The lawsuit joins several other legal actions and international investigations into xAI over its creation and dissemination of nonconsensual sexualized images, including another lawsuit from the mother of one of Musk’s children and a formal European Union inquiry.At the peak of the scandal, researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate calculated that Grok had created about 3m sexualized images in less than two weeks – around 23,000 of which depicted children.
Musk has previously denied that Grok has been used to produce CSAM, claiming in January that he was “not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok.Literally zero.”He also alleged that Grok would not generate any illegal images, and that its operating principle was to follow local laws.In the complaint, filed on Monday, lawyers for the teenage plaintiffs detailed how the girls discovered that AI-altered nude images of them were being circulated online.One girl, referred to as Jane Doe 1, received a message on Instagram in December from an anonymous user, who alerted her that someone in her social circle had uploaded a series of deepfake videos and images to a Discord server that depicted her and other girls from her high school naked and in sexualized positions, according to the complaint.
Jane Doe noticed that three of the photos appeared to be AI-altered images of photographs taken while she was a minor, including one from her school’s homecoming celebration.Criminal investigators later also discovered that the images had been shared on the messaging app Telegram, according to the complaint, where they were allegedly being used as a currency to barter for other child sexual abuse material.“The images showed her entire body, including her genitals, without any clothes.The video depicted her undressing until she was entirely nude,” the complaint states.The other plaintiffs in the suit discovered in February that similar CSAM material featuring them had also been generated via AI and shared online, with the suit seeking damages against xAI for the reputational and mental health harms resulting from the images.
“Watching my daughter have a panic attack after realizing that these images were created and distributed without any hope of recalling them was heartbreaking,” the mother of one of the girls said via a representative.Although the complaint alleges that the images were created using a third-party application accessing Grok’s technology rather than directly on the X website or Grok app, the complaint argues that this use still requires xAI’s servers and that xAI profits from licensing its technology to these apps.Lawyers for the plaintiffs accuse xAI of effectively off-loading liability through its licensing structure and lack of oversight.
‘The videos are terrifying’: students describe spreading panic amid Kent meningitis outbreak
On Monday morning, nine days after a night out at Club Chemistry, a nightclub in Canterbury, Joe Bradshaw realised he had been linked to the meningitis outbreak in Kent that has killed two people, a university student and a sixth-former.He ran through the week in his mind, beginning to worry about those he had been in contact with.“I’m less concerned about my own health than spreading [the infection] to other vulnerable people,” he said. “My mum’s just come out of surgery so her immune system is relatively suppressed.”Bradshaw, 23, is one of the many young people in Canterbury shocked by news of the outbreak
Meningitis outbreak at University of Kent and three schools kills two young people with 11 in hospital
A university and three schools have been struck by an outbreak of invasive meningitis that has killed two young people and left 11 others in hospital.One of the young people to have died was a student at the University of Kent, while the second was a sixth-former at Queen Elizabeth’s grammar school (QEGS) in Faversham.Two other schools, Simon Langton grammar school for boys in Canterbury and Norton Knatchbull school in Ashford, confirmed that both had a year 13 student in hospital with meningitis.The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said on Monday evening it was continuing to investigate the outbreak, with 13 cases notified since March 13, including the two deaths.The sixth-form student at QEGS was named as Juliette by teachers, who described her as a kind and intelligent young woman
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Pat had been in trouble with the police before, when she was 16 and had been spat out of the care system with no qualifications, no housing and no support. Nearly 50 years later, she heard a knock on the door again.There had been a fire in the estate where she lived, and another resident said she had seen Pat start it. “I was in the police station for nearly two days before I got to the magistrates court,” she said, worrying one finger over the top of her hand. “The magistrate said he was sending it to the crown court, and sending me to prison, basically
Robert Goodman obituary
In 1992 a man with poorly controlled schizophrenia climbed into the lions’ enclosure at London Zoo and was badly mauled. This and other horrifying incidents in the early 1990s prompted widespread concern about services for mentally ill people.Better statistics were urgently required. Official surveys initially focused on adults, but in 1999 the Office for National Statistics decided to survey children and young people’s mental health for the first time, turning to the child psychiatrist Robert Goodman to guide their team of psychologists and statisticians.As well as being a distinguished child psychiatrist, Goodman had invented two child psychiatric assessment tools that now underpin population surveys worldwide: the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) and the Development and Well-Being Assessment (DAWBA)
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A sixth-form pupil and a university student in Kent have died and 11 people are believed to be seriously ill in hospital after an outbreak of a rare form of invasive meningitis. We take a look at the disease, and how the situation is being managed.Meningitis is a serious condition in which the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord are infected with bacteria or a virus and become inflamed. It can come on suddenly and can be fatal.The current outbreak appears to involve invasive meningococcal disease
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