Deepfake Nudes Are Haunting America’s Teens

You are a teenage girl in 2026. You’re going hiking. You’re at the beach. You’re getting glam for a homecoming dance, posing with your friends, enjoying the kinds of moments that high school kids have been memorializing without incident for decades.

These are the kinds of wholesome, keepsake memories that have been forever ruined for the three Jane Does in Tennessee who are part of a class-action lawsuit filed in March against xAI, Elon Musk’s A.I. company.

A person known to at least one of these three girls used xAI’s assistant, Grok, to generate sexually explicit images appearing to be them based on real, clothed photos. Of Plaintiff Jane Doe 1, the lawsuit asserts that doctored images “showed her entire body, including her genitals, without any clothes. The video depicted her undressing until she was entirely nude.” These scenes were created, in part, using this teenager’s face from her yearbook photo.

It gets worse. The perpetrator allegedly circulated altered pictures of at least 18 underage girls to Discord, a popular messaging platform. Their first names and the name of their school appear to be attached to the images, making them identifiable.

All three Jane Does have experienced extreme stress because of this victimization. Jane Doe 1, according to the lawsuit, “feels acute anxiety about who has viewed these files online and feels a complete lack of control over the ongoing dissemination of the files.”

The suit describes lives narrowed by this injury. Two of the Jane Does fear engaging in normal activities like going to class as a result of this abuse, and all three say that their reputations are damaged when people believe these images are real. While this suit focuses on female victims, teenage boys have also been harmed by harassment and extortion using A.I.-generated deepfakes.

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Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.

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