Washington Post: Woman alleges Grok made thousands of sexual abuse images from childhood snap

The Washington Post is reporting a Wyoming woman alleges in a federal lawsuit her stepfather used the Grok chatbot to transform a childhood photo into child sexual abuse material. In the report by Nitasha Tiku and Faiz Siddiqui of the Post, “Jane Doe 4” arrived at her parents’ house in Wyoming to set up a family party earlier this year, the familiar street in her small hometown was filled with state and local law enforcement.

A man who flashed a badge told Doe he had a warrant to search her stepfather’s electronic devices for child sexual abuse material, she said. A technician looking for a hard drive with family photos said it had something to do with artificial intelligence, she said. She later learned that her stepfather had created thousands of sexually explicit images of her as a child and traded them online, she said. He manipulated a photo taken when she was about 11, showing her lying on a couch in an oversize T-shirt, the filings claim, transforming it into graphic fake images. 

Doe’s stepfather made the more than 7,000 fake explicit images of her using the AI chatbot Grok, released by Elon Musk’s company xAI, according to the documents she filed last month in a federal lawsuit against the company. Two days after the raid, her stepfather was found dead by suicide inside his car, parked in her hometown, Doe said.

Doe’s experience, publicly described by her for the first time, shows some of the potential consequences from a growing form of sexual abuse enabled by AI apps. In July, Jane joined a federal lawsuit that was filed against xAI in March by three Tennessee teenagers, two still minors, identified as Jane Does 1, 2 and 3. They alleged that Grok had been used to sexualize photos of them taken when they were younger.