xAI seeks identities of plaintiffs in Grok deepfake lawsuit involving sexualised images

Elon Musk's artificial intelligence platform xAI has filed a motion requesting a federal court to force the disclosure of the identity of the four plaintiffs, as reported by Wired, based on the recently filed court documents. The four plaintiffs, identified as South Carolina Doe, South Carolina Roe, New Jersey Doe, and Ohio Doe, alleged that the xAI's Grok chatbot was used to create deepfake sexualised images and was circulated. Among the four plaintiffs, one of them is a minor. This follows an uproar caused in January when scores of men likely used the Grok chatbot to create fake images of women, including children, “undressed” and in bikinis.

According to an Analysis from the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, Grok was used to create 3 million sexualised images over just 11 days, among which 23,000 were potentially material of child sexual abuse. The analysis formed the evidentiary backbone of the litigation, demonstrating the lack of a guardrail in Musk's chatbot.

In an affidavit on May 29, the four plaintiffs who filed the class-action lawsuit alleged that they faced emotional distress following the images were created. They further fear online harassment and doxing if their real names are used in the lawsuit. They worry about what their colleagues or employers would think if they saw those images. The South Carolina Doe said that she was “stripped down to a revealing bikini” and it shows her body “in a way that I would not ever share publicly.”

Also Read: 'Ceasefire' is 'moderate shooting'- Trump says he won't resume full scale war if Tehran does not kill US troops

“If I were forced to reveal my name publicly as part of this case, I would fear that those who support Elon Musk, his companies, and Grok, whom I have observed to be very vocal online, would find my name in the public record, disseminate it, dox me, and retaliate against me by creating additional and more extreme deepfakes of me,” read the filing as reported by Wired.

“Having stripped them of their clothes, xAI now seeks to strip Plaintiffs of their pseudonyms in an obvious effort to intimidate Plaintiffs into dropping the litigation by compounding the same harms that they seek to remedy,” said Sophia Rios, a lawyer representing the individuals for the legal firm Berger Montague.

A judge in the US District Court of Southern California allowed the complainant to use pseudonyms. But in May, xAI filed a motion with the federal court, urging them to disclose their names under civil court laws. Those who are suing the xAI have said that they will disclose the identity to the organisation but want to use the pseudonym publicly. xAI claims that there is a public interest in the identities of those who are suing the company. They further claim that since those deepfake images will not be made public as part of the case, this should allay any privacy concerns.

“Factoring out the deepfake image itself—as it will remain under seal—there is nothing inherently stigmatising about revealing the fact that a deepfake image was created of South Carolina Doe without revealing the image itself,” the lawyers wrote in the May 15 filings.

The lawyers of the complainant say that the images were “highly personal and embarrassing deepfakes depicting Plaintiffs that were disseminated without their consent.” They say that xAI's requests should be declined. According to the legal filing, all four pseudonyms of the claimants will drop out of the proceedings if their names are disclosed.