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Grok Creator SpaceXAI Sues Minnesota AG to Stop Ban on Nudification
"xAI accordingly does not contest Minnesota’s interest in prohibiting the dissemination of artificially generated nude images of real people without their consent. But […]"
So reads an excerpt from the first paragraph of a new lawsuit against Minnesota's attoney general from xAI, LLC , the SpaceX AI division recently rebranded as SpaceXAI . (It appears the company's LLC and primary website url haven't been updated to match the SpaceXAI rebrand. They should kick it into high gear because I'm very sick of writing all this stuff out).
As you probably recall, over this past holiday break, a capability of xAI's Grok chatbot went viral, and users created countless nonconsensual sexual images of real people , including many of underage people. One estimate using extrapolation placed the number of sexualized images of children created by Grok at 23,000. A statement on X later said Grok's capabilities were changed to prevent this. "We remain committed to making X a safe platform for everyone and continue to have zero tolerance for any forms of child sexual exploitation, non-consensual nudity, and unwanted sexual content," the statement said in part.
But now Minnesota has a new law on its books that bans nudification apps and websites—any tech that takes images of clothed people and automatically makes them nude, generally with AI. The law, HF 1606 , bans the act of using the software, and penalizes the companies themselves—allowing the state to levy fines, and opening the door to lawsuits from victims. It "prohibits the access, download, or use of nudification technology, except when the website, app, or software requires the substantial application of technological or artistic skill by a human creator directing and controlling the output," according to CBS News . It theoretically goes into effect next month.
But the suit from xAI characterizes the law as so excessively broad that it curbs valid uses of AI. It also says the law fails to take into account intent. And it imposes "massive civil penalties," despite its alleged deficiencies.
Large swaths of the lawsuit are dedicated to contesting the law's criteria for nudity. It alleges that Minnesota disregarded an apparent common sense definition of "intimate" body parts, and instead used a definition pulled from a law against certain kinds of physical touch. Thus, the law, the suit argues, bans software from generating images of female or male breasts, and any depiction of anyone's "inner thigh."
The lawsuit includes some examples of what it argues would be considered banned nudification in Minnesota under the law if it went into effect. One is what it calls a "viral snapshot" attached to a social media post by President Trump. It features Trump, along with "Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgam […] shirtless in the Washington Mall's reflecting pool, along with an unknown (possibly fictitious) woman." Note that you can, I'm sorry to say, see AI-generated male breasts, as well as part of Trump's AI-generated inner thigh.
According to the suit, the new law's penalty structure creates a situation in which outputting ten images as theoretically harmless as the Trump reflecting pool slop pic could result in $5 million in penalties for the company queried in order to generate them. "And a business whose users created a hundred thousand images covered by HF 1606 (not at all unlikely for a publicly available program with millions of users generating billions of images) could owe an eye-popping $50 billion dollars," the suit claims.
"Liability also attaches even if the image has artistic, scientific, political, satirical, educational, medical, or religious value, and (again) even if the company has deployed near-perfect, state-of-the-art technical controls to prevent the generation of nude images."
The suit asks the judge to declare HF 1606 unconstitutional, and stop it from being enforced. In response to a different lawsuit, a Minnesota ban on prediction markets that also would have gone into effect next month was prevented from entering force via a judge's ruling handed down yesterday .
Governor Tim Walz, who signed the bill into law, tweeted the following about the suit:
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