For her safety, Doe has opted to receive alerts from the US Department of Justice Victim Notification System any time she may be a victim in a new criminal investigation. Although she has received countless alerts, she was shocked when the CCCP notified her that it had identified AI-generated CSAM on xAI that depicted her. This re-traumatized Doe, whose complaint alleged that messages were found on online forums “between offenders chatting about creating AI generated CSAM of Plaintiff and other similarly situated known, legacy, victims of CSAM.”
Now, Doe fears that xAI has not only made it easier to make more violative images of the most distressing time in her life, but also that xAI allegedly has stored the images that Grok generates and uses those outputs to further train Grok. Because of this, she believes that Grok has been trained on both the initial set of images that have haunted her for more than 20 years and the more recent AI-generated ones.
This is the first case to accuse xAI of training on CSAM, and the complaint does not go into great detail on that claim. Previously, Ars reported on a controversial dataset that was later scrubbed after researchers found CSAM in the training data, but there’s no indication xAI trained on that data. In a press release from lawyers representing Doe, it explained that Doe’s images were included in a CSAM Hash List maintained by NCMEC, and “that same material” allegedly “was part of the dataset xAI used to build Grok’s image and video generating capabilities.” The complaint similarly only alleged that “CSAM depicting Plaintiff with its longstanding well-known hash values has been used as a part of the dataset used by xAI.”
I’ve always said that the biggest difference between a billionaire on a yatch and a homeless man with a cart of garbage is luck.
Billionaires usually start with a specific luck package that includes generational wealth and family connections. Then, a bunch of opportunity being at the right place at the right time.
If you don’t have one of the first two then the opportunity has to do a whole lot more heavy lifting. Also, if you have enough generational wealth, then you can fail upwards, as did George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump.
Also plenty of people have the starting gen-wealth/family-connections package but not the luck of opportunity. And they will commonly end up with a solid career, but doesn’t move them towards ultra-wealthy status. So millions or even tens of millions rather than hundreds of millions or billions.
And then there’s the rare dude like Tom Anderson who made MySpace, sold it for about $500 million and has since spent the rest of his life traveling and going on fun adventures. But he would have been a musician or a philosophy professor if he didn’t luck into making MySpace.
It may mostly be luck, but you would not believe the number of people that were given so many opportunities and waste them buying luxury cars instead of avoiding debt
Tom Sexton likes to say that rich people are poor people with money