Mother of Elon Musk’s child says his AI Bot won’t stop creating sexualized images of her despite objections

Elon Musk has 14 children with four different women. Oftentimes, they end up in the news over internal issues, like Musk delegitimizing one of his children’s transgender identity — seldom do they end up in situations that have the potential to affect national policy. But when Musk’s AI chatbot started generating sexually charged photos of one of his children’s mothers, the public started wondering where the boundaries are.

Ashley St. Clair, nowadays self-styled as a conservative content creator, has already had public conflicts with the tech billionaire. Musk’s net worth is currently upwards of $700 billion, according to Forbes. By many accounts, this is the most wealth one person has accumulated in centuries. Still, Ashley St. Clair accused Musk of not helping out financially with the raising of their child, so it is safe to assume that the two are not always on good terms with each other.

When Musk introduced his chatbot Grok, which was to be housed on his social media platform X, there was an initial promise. The way these AI chatbots work is heavily influenced by scraping information readily available online. With all the information and content that has been posted on Twitter over the years, the potential for Grok to become a major player in the AI arms race could not be understated. But Musk was also clear about shaping the chatbot in his own image of a lack of inhibition, and that is how users ended up with a bot that infuriated people by surfacing Nazi material and sexualizing images of women without their consent.

St. Clair found herself in that same conundrum when Grok kept bending to her followers’ requests and continued generating images of her in sexually suggestive clothing. St. Clair asked the bot directly to stop, and even though it acknowledged her request, it still did not stop generating the images. She complained that it later began generating images of her in a bikini at the age of 14 — something other users have also said they experienced.

Musk was eventually pushed to make a formal response. According to NBC, he took to X to write that “anyone using Grok to create illegal content will face the same consequences as if they uploaded illegal content themselves.” Musk also said that users who prompt Grok to generate illegal content will face permanent suspension from the platform. No statement was made regarding the creation of sexually suggestive content of women above the age of 18, even when generated without their consent.

Grok is still a new technology with significant promise. Especially on X, where even world leaders are prone to spreading misinformation directly to the public. But the idea that such technology can operate without guardrails is a fantasy. With every passing day, these tech titans tell every camera and microphone how dangerous AI’s potential is, almost as if they are describing a nuclear weapon.

The way they handle it, however, tells a different story. They began by saying they did not mind people losing their jobs, being misinformed, or even having art autogenerated. Now they are saying they do not mind if anyone in the world can essentially leak someone’s nude image, even if they have never met them. That feels like taking things too far.