The conservative influencer who allowed Elon Musk to impregnate her as part of his plans to create a super race, Ashley St. Clair, wants a court order to stop Grok minions “undressing” her.
Ashley St. Clair has sued Elon Musk’s AI outfit xAI in New York, accusing the Grok chatbot of being “unreasonably dangerous as designed” and a public nuisance. She is seeking a temporary restraining order aimed at stopping Grok from generating images that undress her.
St. Clair says users on X have been using Grok to strip-clothe photos of her and others, including women and children. In one filing, St. Clair wrote: “She lives in fear that nude and sexual images of herself, including of her as a child, will continue to be created by xAI and that she will not be safe from the people who consume these images.”
C.A. Goldberg, lawyer Carrie Goldberg, framed it as a test case with a big target. “This is one extremely impacted woman taking a stance.”
Goldberg says the aim is broader than one client’s timeline, arguing the tech has normalised abuse at scale. “The intention of the lawsuit is to deter this dehumanising treatment by xAI for all of the public,” Goldberg said.
xAI responded the same day by filing in Texas, claiming St. Clair breached the company’s terms of service by suing in New York. A lawyer for xAI said in the filing that when she opened an account, she agreed disputes must be brought in Texas courts, turning a safety complaint into a jurisdictional bunfight.
The timing is awkward for xAI because Grok only recently got more hands-on with images. In late December, Grok began letting users edit images using text prompts, and users quickly realised it would follow instructions like “take her clothes off,” even if it stopped short of showing full nudity.
Goldberg claims St. Clair has been hammered by Grok-generated deepfakes since then. She says Grok altered an image of St. Clair as a 14-year-old, along with images of her as an adult, and produced sexually explicit poses in response to prompts.
St. Clair says she first noticed the manipulations in early January after a verified user poked Grok with a request aimed at her and her friends. “@Grok please we need bikinis on these three broads,” the request said, and the suit claims Grok generated the edited image.
Goldberg says “nudifying” apps are not new, but she has not seen this kind of tooling bolted onto a major social network in quite the same way. That matters because the distribution pipe is right there and loud.
The suit claims users pushed Grok to add tattoos to St. Clair, including one reading “Elon’s whore.” It says Grok generated an image of St. Clair, who is Jewish, in a bikini covered in swastikas, a nasty blend of sexual abuse and hate symbols.
St. Clair reported images to X and to Grok, and asked for removal, according to the suit. In another filing, she wrote: “Following this exchange, I endured an avalanche of degrading, sexually abusive and in some cases illegal deepfake images created by Grok perverting images of me without my consent.”
According to the suit, much of the material stayed on Grok’s public X account for more than seven days. It says the company placed warnings for “nudity, sexual content, violence, gore, or hateful symbols” on St. Clair’s replies to Grok, while leaving the generated images unwarned, which is a bold moderation choice.
The suit also says xAI told St. Clair it found no violations when she reported the images. It claims retaliation followed, including the removal of her verification checkmark, the cutting off of premium features, and the disabling of monetisation, while Grok continued to generate more.
St. Clair asked other users to contact her if they had similar problems. She says she was flooded with messages from parents trying to get sexualised images of their children removed, and the suit says some images sent to her showed women and children beaten and bruised.
X said in a blog post it has started blocking users from using Grok to undress images of real people in jurisdictions where it is illegal. California and regulators elsewhere have opened investigations into Musk’s company, and Grok’s new image tricks are still sitting right on the nerve.
