Elon Musk’s xAI announced yesterday that it has raised $20 billion from investors. It’s all part of the intense competition in AI, with Musk fighting to build the world’s most intelligent chatbot. Investors are so eager to get in on this opportunity, the $15 billion Musk sought rose to $20 billion by the close of the round. The company is expected to be valued at $230 billion—rising fast, even for Musk.
It’s just another day in the AI race. But this shows where priorities lie, given that the very same day Fortune published a piece outlining a serious problem at xAI: its chatbot Grok producing non-consensual sexualized images of real people.
My colleague Bea Nolan interviewed Ashley St. Clair, a conservative political commentator, social media influencer, and mother of one of Musk’s children. (He’s questioned paternity.) She said that she became a victim of Grok’s “undressing” spree. “When I saw [the images], I immediately replied and tagged Grok and said I don’t consent to this,” St. Clair told Bea. “[Grok] noted that I don’t consent to these images being produced…and then it continued producing the images, and they only got more explicit.”
Grok produced images of St. Clair “with nothing covering me except a piece of floss, with my toddler’s backpack in the background,” she recalled. “I felt so disgusted and violated,” she said. And she felt angry this was happening to other women. She says that after speaking out publicly, multiple other women with similar experiences contacted her; she has reviewed inappropriate images of minors created by Grok; and she’s considering legal action over the images.
