Ashley St. Clair, a conservative content creator who has a child with X owner Elon Musk, says the platform’s AI chatbot Grok has repeatedly generated sexualized images of her without consent, including some based on childhood photos. St. Clair said Grok promised to stop creating the images but instead produced increasingly explicit content, with some depicting her at age 14. “Photos of me of 14 years old, undressed and put in a bikini,” St. Clair said.
The controversy erupted after Grok introduced an image editing feature in December that allows users to prompt the AI to alter any photo uploaded to X, with many using it to create deepfakes showing women and children in revealing clothing. St. Clair told NBC News she has “lost count” of how many AI-generated images of herself she has seen in recent days, and that she has chosen not to reach out to Musk personally, preferring to use “resources available to everyone else.”
The issue has drawn scrutiny from regulators and child safety organizations, with U.K. communications regulator Ofcom making “urgent contact” with X and xAI to understand their compliance with legal duties. Fallon McNulty of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children said the organization has received reports about Grok-created posts and expressed concern about how the technology normalizes harmful content. “What is so concerning is how accessible and easy to use this technology is,” McNulty said.
While Musk posted Saturday that anyone using Grok to make illegal content would face consequences, many inappropriate images remained online Monday evening. St. Clair argued the AI industry must self-regulate, saying the male-dominated field has created systems biased against women. “The pressure needs to come from the AI industry itself, because they’re only going to regulate themselves if they speak out,” she said.