All entries on Feminist Legal Clinic’s News Digest Blog are extracts from news articles and other publications, with the source available at the link at the bottom. The content is not originally generated by Feminist Legal Clinic and does not necessarily reflect our views.
The mother of one of Elon Musk’s sons has said she felt “horrified and violated” after fans of the billionaire used his AI tool, Grok, to create fake sexualised images of her by manipulating real pictures.
The writer and political strategist Ashley St Clair, who became estranged from Musk after the birth of their child in 2024, told the Guardian that supporters of the X owner were using the tool to create a form of revenge porn, and had even undressed a picture of her as a child.
Grok has come under fire from lawmakers and regulators worldwide after it emerged it had been used to virtually undress images of women and children, and show them in compromising sexualised positions.
St Clair said the abuse became worse when she publicly complained about her images being manipulated.
Since speaking out, other abuse victims have been in contact. She has been sent other disturbing sexual images the AI tool has made, including some of children. “Since I posted this I have been sent a six-year-old covered in what’s supposed to be semen,” said St Clair. “She was in a full dress. They said to put her in a blue bikini and cover her in what looks like semen.”
The mainstreaming of this abuse had been made possible by Grok, she said, adding: “I am also seeing images where they add bruises to women, beat them up, tie them up, mutilated. These sickos used to have to go to the dark depths of the internet and now it is on a mainstream social media app.”
St Clair believes this is being done to silence women and that the problem will get worse. This was because the AI was being “trained” on the prompts it was given by sexually abusive men, while women were being frightened off the platform by the abuse, she said.
“If you are a woman you can’t post a picture and you can’t speak or you risk this abuse,” she said. “It’s dangerous and I believe this is by design. You are supposed to feed AI humanity and thoughts and when you are doing things that particularly impact women and they don’t want to participate in it because they are being targeted, it means the AI is inherently going to be biased.”
She referred to it as a “civil rights issue” because “women do not have the ability to participate in and train the models the same as men when they are being targeted. The other LLMs are being trained on the internet too and it’s poisoning the well.”
Musk and his team could have stopped this widespread abuse of women in minutes, she said. “These people believe they are above the law, because they are. They don’t think they are going to get in trouble, they think they have no consequences.”