xAI sues user for exploiting AI tool to sexualise minors

Lawsuit accuses Terry Harwood of misusing xAI to bypass safeguards and produce explicit deepfakes involving minorsElon Musk’s xAI has filed a lawsuit against a South Carolina man who was arrested earlier this year on charges of sexually exploiting minors, alleging that he misused the company’s AI tool to create sexually explicit content involving a child.The lawsuit, filed in a Texas federal court on Tuesday, alleges that Terry Harwood knowingly violated the company’s terms of service to create the material.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemslist 1 of 4US consumer prices drop in June as energy costs tumblelist 2 of 4New York imposes landmark one-year ban on large data centreslist 3 of 4My Twitter, not Xlist 4 of 4How US-Iran escalation will test Iraq’s balancing actend of list“[The] Defendant opened multiple xAI accounts using false identities. Despite expressly agreeing to abide by the xAI Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy, Defendant designed misleading prompts to circumvent Grok’s built-in safeguards and then abused the tool to convert non-sexual photographs into sexually explicit images without the photograph subjects’ knowledge or consent,” the 12-page complaint said.The suit alleges that Harwood uploaded images of both adults and minors that were not sexual in nature and then tried to create so-called “deepfakes” that sexualised them.“A review of Defendant’s xAI accounts further shows that on numerous occasions during the Relevant Period, Defendant submitted prompts to Grok to alter such images to sexualize the subjects of the images, which Grok responded to by refusing to follow the prompts on the basis that such material violated Grok’s content moderation guardrails,” the complaint added.“In response, Defendant repeatedly submitted further prompts, with alterations, in an effort to circumvent Grok’s moderation efforts.”xAI is also seeking monetary damages, although the case did not specify a dollar amount, as well as a court order permanently banning Harwood from using the platform, which has more than 2.6 million users.