xAI’s last-minute scramble to stop Minnesota’s anti-nudification app law
xAI’s last-minute scramble to stop Minnesota’s anti-nudification app law
xAI 紧急采取行动，试图阻止明尼苏达州的反“裸体化”应用法案
xAI is suing Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison over a law passed back in May that broadly targets “nudification” apps, claiming that the statute’s punitive provisions leave the company with “no practical choice but to restrict Grok Imagine’s image-editing features in various ways.” The law, the company argues, violates the First Amendment.
xAI 正在起诉明尼苏达州总检察长基思·埃里森（Keith Ellison），起因是该州在今年五月通过了一项广泛针对“裸体化”（nudification）应用的法律。xAI 声称，该法案的惩罚性条款使公司“别无选择，只能以各种方式限制 Grok Imagine 的图像编辑功能”。该公司认为，这项法律违反了美国宪法第一修正案。
Back in January, Grok flooded the internet with millions of sexually explicit deepfakes, including images of minors. In another era, a content moderation disaster of this magnitude would have had the CEO flipping the kill switch on the product within hours. But in Elon Musk’s brave new world, the chatbot was left to pump out pornographic images for days. “Grok now hitting #1 on the App Store in one country after another!” he posted in the midst of the deepfake epidemic.
今年一月，Grok 在互联网上充斥了数百万张色情深度伪造（deepfake）图像，其中包括未成年人的图像。在过去，如此规模的内容审核灾难本应让首席执行官在几小时内就关停该产品。但在埃隆·马斯克（Elon Musk）的“美丽新世界”里，这个聊天机器人却被放任自流，连续数日输出色情图像。在深度伪造泛滥期间，他甚至发帖称：“Grok 现在在多个国家的 App Store 排名第一！”
In Minnesota, the state legislature passed a law targeting “nudification” technology, prohibiting site owners from allowing people to “access, download, or use” such software. (The law makes a carve-out for tech that “requires the technical skill of a user to nudify an image or video” — so bespoke sexual harassment through Photoshop is in the clear.) The statute creates a civil cause of action for private individuals who may wish to sue, and also authorizes the state attorney general to seek penalties of up to $500,000 per violation.
在明尼苏达州，州议会通过了一项针对“裸体化”技术的法律，禁止网站所有者允许用户“访问、下载或使用”此类软件。（该法律为那些“需要用户具备技术能力才能将图像或视频裸体化”的技术留出了豁免空间——因此，通过 Photoshop 进行的定制化性骚扰行为并不在禁止之列。）该法案为希望起诉的个人设立了民事诉讼权，并授权州总检察长对每次违规行为寻求最高 50 万美元的罚款。
The law, touted as the first of its kind, was signed by Gov. Tim Walz in May, and is meant to go into effect on August 1st. It’s a bit of a mystery as to why xAI did not file a lawsuit in the last three months, and instead sued just a couple of days before the statute went into effect. It’s the kind of delayed reaction that makes you wonder if someone at xAI suddenly noticed last week that they were about to be in violation of a fairly punitive law, and then spent the next few days trying to find a law firm willing to work overtime on behalf of a nonconsensual deepfake generator.
这项被誉为同类首创的法律由州长蒂姆·沃尔兹（Tim Walz）于五月签署，原定于 8 月 1 日生效。令人费解的是，xAI 为什么在过去三个月里没有提起诉讼，偏偏在法案生效前几天才采取行动。这种迟来的反应不禁让人怀疑，xAI 是否有人在上周才突然意识到他们即将触犯这项严厉的法律，随后才匆忙寻找愿意为非自愿深度伪造生成器加班的律师事务所。
The complaint is pretty reasonable, all things considered. The Minnesota law is overbroad, it argues, because it imposes liability even for images that are consensually generated, or images of adults that are merely sort-of kind-of sexy, or images with “humorous” or “artistic” merit. The First Amendment dictates that laws must be narrowly written so as to avoid banning social and political commentary like this deepfake of Chris Christie and JB Pritzker sumo wrestling.
从各方面来看，这份诉状的内容还算合理。它指出，明尼苏达州的法律范围过于宽泛，因为它甚至对那些经同意生成的图像、仅带有轻微性感色彩的成人图像，或是具有“幽默”或“艺术”价值的图像也施加了责任。第一修正案规定，法律必须严谨起草，以避免禁止像克里斯·克里斯蒂（Chris Christie）和 JB·普利兹克（JB Pritzker）相扑摔跤这种深度伪造图像所代表的社会和政治评论。
“Liability also attaches … even if the company has deployed near-perfect, state-of-the-art technical controls to prevent the generation of nude images,” the lawsuit states with an excruciating degree of earnestness. Elsewhere, it bemoans the strict liability that attaches for the unsanctioned conduct of its users — “images and videos that users might manage to create in violation of Grok’s terms of service, which is possible only by evading sophisticated, state-of-the-art controls that xAI employs.”
“即使公司已经部署了近乎完美、最先进的技术控制手段来防止裸体图像的生成，责任依然存在……”诉讼书以一种极其严肃的态度写道。在其他地方，它还抱怨了因用户未经授权的行为而产生的严格责任——“用户可能设法创建违反 Grok 服务条款的图像和视频，而这只有在规避了 xAI 所采用的复杂、尖端控制手段的情况下才有可能实现。”
xAI’s lawyers might have a point, but their lawsuit reads like a missive from another planet. They claim, for instance, that existing Minnesota and federal law (like the TAKE IT DOWN Act) already prevents the nonconsensual dissemination of nude deepfakes. These statutes, the lawyers argue, are written in a constitutional way — the nudification law, on the other hand, is not. And as with any laws in America that target speech based on its content, these statutes must be written in as unrestrictive a way as possible while still addressing a “compelling” government interest.
xAI 的律师或许有其道理，但他们的诉讼书读起来就像是来自另一个星球的信件。例如，他们声称现有的明尼苏达州法律和联邦法律（如《TAKE IT DOWN 法案》）已经能够防止非自愿传播裸体深度伪造内容。律师们认为，这些法规的起草符合宪法，而“裸体化”法案则不然。正如美国所有针对言论内容的法律一样，这些法规必须在解决“迫切”政府利益的同时，尽可能减少对言论的限制。
But that’s of course the crux of the problem with the Grok deepfake-ocalypse. If existing law was up to the task, the entire month of January 2026 wouldn’t have been awash with nonconsensual porn. When the Center for Countering Digital Hate analyzed an 11-day period from December 29th to January 8th, it found that Grok had generated around 3 million sexualized images. Around 23,000 of those images depicted children. “That is a shocking rate of one sexualized image of a child every 41 seconds,” the report read.
但这正是 Grok 深度伪造灾难的核心问题所在。如果现有法律足以应对，2026 年 1 月就不会充斥着非自愿的色情内容。当数字仇恨打击中心（Center for Countering Digital Hate）分析了从 12 月 29 日到 1 月 8 日这 11 天的数据时，发现 Grok 生成了约 300 万张色情化图像。其中约 2.3 万张涉及儿童。“这是一个令人震惊的比例，即每 41 秒就有一张儿童色情化图像，”报告写道。