The FBI obtained prompts used to make more than 200 sexual videos of a woman in a harassment case.#CourtWatch
FBI Got Grok to Hand Over Prompts Used to Create Nonconsensual Porn
This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here.The FBI got a search warrant for X to provide details on the Grok prompts a man allegedly used to create more than 200 nonconsensual sexual videos of a woman he knew in real life, according to court records.
The details of the investigation are contained in an FBI affidavit about the alleged actions of Simon Tuck, who is accused of extensively harassing and threatening the woman’s husband. Tuck regularly worked out with and texted with the woman and, according to the affidavit, secretly filmed her while she was working out in his garage. Over the course of the last several months, Tuck swatted their home, made a series of anonymous reports to the man’s employer claiming that he was a child abuser and a drug addict, posed as the man and made a series of mass shooting and suicide threats. Tuck also made a series of other threats and bizarre actions, which included reaching out to a funeral home to say that the man would be dead soon and sending threats to the man while posing as a member of Sector 16, a Russian hacking crew.
The affidavit notes that, in January, the FBI got a search warrant for the man’s conversations with Grok. The FBI says that it received “prompts provided to GrokAI that generated approximately 200 pornographic videos of a woman who closely resembled VICTIM’s wife’s physical appearance.”
“For example, in one prompt, TUCK queried: ‘In a sensual sports style, a confident blonde woman playfully undresses on a tennis court, starting with her white crop top pulled up to expose her bare breasts. She has long wavy hair, a toned athletic body, and a flirtatious smile, wearing a short navy pleated skirt and holding a racket. She slowly lowers her top, revealing full nudity, tosses her hair, and swings the racket teasingly, with a surprising clumsy spin like a comedic twirl,’” the affidavit says.
The FBI says that Tuck also allegedly used Grok to create a complaint about the woman’s husband that was then filed to the company he works for.The actions described in the affidavit are extreme and horrifying, but are not terribly out of the ordinary for harassment cases that we have reported on before. What’s notable here is that this case shows that law enforcement is looking at chats with AI bots as potential sources of evidence and that X is complying with these requests.
Most importantly, it highlights X’s role in allowing Grok to create nonconsensual sexual material in a criminal case that involves extreme cyberstalking and real life harm. According to the affidavit, Tuck used Grok to create this nonconsensual sexual material at the same time that Grok was being heavily criticized for creating child sexual abuse material. This all happened during the “undress her” phenomenon, which showed just how terribly Grok’s content moderation is. Last week, we also reported that Grok was used to reveal the real name of an adult performer.
Correction: This piece originally said the FBI issued Grok with a subpoena. It was a search warrant.
