Minnesota ‘nudification’ law survives xAI’s request for a legal injunction

The District Court of Minnesota has rejected the efforts of Elon Musk’s xAI to seek an injunction to suspend the law until a court could hear its constitutional challenge to the law itself, according to a report by Reuters. Judge Donovan W. Frank, in his Conclusion, argued that “xAI has not demonstrated irreparable harm and the balance of harms tips steeply in favor of the State.”

The bill Musk is trying to fight was recently passed into law by Minnesota, becoming the nation’s first anti-nudification law. Companies found in violation of this law would be subject to fines of up to $500,000 every time artificial intelligence is used to alter images to depict the “intimate parts” of a person in such a way that “a reasonable person would believe that the intimate part belongs to the identifiable individual.”

xAI is alleging that the Minnesota bill is a First Amendment violation of not only itself, as a corporate entity, but also a violation of the rights of its users. That larger lawsuit has yet to go to trial, but Attorney General Keith Ellison has already given his unvarnished opinion: “I would argue that there is no First Amendment right to falsely exploit somebody’s image and make them appear naked.”

Meanwhile, xAI is already being sued by a “Jane Doe” in Arkansas, alleging that xAI “chose to release and monetize a product that they knew, or at minimum should have known, could and would be used to digitally exploit children for commercial gain.” 

Interestingly, xAI’s own Acceptable Use Policy explicitly forbids “[u]ndressing or nudifying real persons, or otherwise altering a real person’s image or likeness to depict them in an intimate or sexual context,” so it isn’t clear why they are simultaneously taking the state of Minnesota to court for a law that would criminalize behavior they already ostensibly prohibit, unless their Acceptable Use Policy is little more than an attempt to indemnify them against legal repercussions. 

In the meantime, xAI’s lawsuit will be allowed to continue, and anyone concerned about the future use and regulation of artificial intelligence should pay very close attention to the findings.