On Monday, xAI - a subsidiary of SpaceX - filed a federal lawsuit in Minnesota seeking to block a recently enacted state law that prohibits applications and websites from generating non-consensual explicit images. The legislation, enacted in April, aims at platforms and applications that enable users to produce non-consensual explicit images, imposing a $500,000 penalty per occurrence when someone generates a deepfake.
xAI's lawyers say that penalty adds up fast. If a business's users created 100,000 prohibited images, the total fine would come to $50 billion. According to xAI's complaint, the potential fine is "an eye-popping $50 billion dollars."
Minnesota state Senator Erin Maye Quade championed the legislation after discovering a case where a man used social media photos of more than 80 women he personally knew to produce sexualized imagery and videos without their permission. In a September interview with CNBC, Maye Quade compared the intended statute to existing legislation that forbids looking through windows to take explicit photographs.
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xAI's previous legal challenge in California resulted in a partial victory when a federal judge struck down a law limiting AI-generated deepfakes in election contexts. That case also raised First Amendment concerns similar to those in the Minnesota suit. xAI argued that the California law was overly broad and infringed on the rights of developers and users.
At the center of the lawsuit is a free speech argument. In the legal paperwork, xAI's lawyers argued that the law "imposes an overbroad, content-based ban on free speech and the tools of visual expression in a clumsy attempt to prohibit 'nudification.'" xAI's legal team contended that the statute breaches First Amendment safeguards and that the fines are excessive.
This is not xAI's first legal fight over this kind of regulation. The company previously initiated a comparable lawsuit contesting a California statute designed to combat AI-produced deepfakes within that state. That earlier legal action achieved partial success when a federal judge invalidated the legislation that would have limited AI-generated deepfakes in electoral contexts.
xAI claims it already maintains safeguards to prevent its platform from being used to create unapproved nude or explicit imagery. The company states that it "strictly prohibits" that kind of content. In its complaint, xAI notes that it has filed suit against users who "evade its extensive technological blockers to generate such images in violation."
xAI is now owned by SpaceX, which trades under the ticker SPCX. Additionally, the company faces a proposed class action where plaintiffs claim that xAI's Grok chatbot and image-generation tool was employed to produce and distribute child sexual abuse content using their authentic photographs or videos. The lawsuit further asserts that xAI did not report to authorities regarding alleged perpetrators who utilized Grok to "nudify" their images.
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