In March, a girl’s stepfather took his own life after cops discovered that he had used Grok to create 7,000 sexually explicit images using one photo taken when his stepdaughter was 11 years old, the amended complaint alleged.
Grok allowed the man to generate extreme images depicting incest and rape without flagging any harmful behavior, the complaint said. Seemingly, xAI’s child safety system only intervened after the man input a prompt for “gang rape.” That request sent a CyberTip to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which alerted law enforcement to the AI CSAM.
Yet the harm was not stopped then, either. Despite mandatory reporting requirements to share information like a user’s IP address when CSAM is flagged, xAI repeatedly refused to help cops or NCMEC identify the user, the complaint alleged. For weeks, xAI allegedly “obstructed this investigation at every turn” and made it harder for “law enforcement efforts to locate, identify, and apprehend the perpetrator.”
Eventually, the stepfather was arrested after cops obtained a warrant to seize his devices. That’s when “a forensic review revealed approximately 7,000 AI-generated images and videos” depicting his stepdaughter, which were allegedly produced using Grok. Without Grok providing users with easy access to “undressing” capabilities, his family doubts he ever would have generated the harmful images, which he allegedly trafficked online in trade for “CSAM produced by other child sex predators.”
Yep though I do think this technical distinction you bring up is really only relevant in a clinical context.
Meanwhile the one between "pedophile" and "child abuser" is extremely important in real-life prevention of child abuse. The ideas that 1) only people with sexual attraction to kids would sexually abuse kids, and 2) if you feel sexual attraction to kids obviously you're gonna act on it, both seem logical but have both been comprehensively disproven.
A huge added barrier here is that people - for understandable reasons - don't want to really try to think through and reason logically about such a disgusting and emotionally laden subject, much less empathize with a pedophile. Unfortunately that exactly is required if we're not just looking to satisfy our vengeful sense of justice, but actually do something for the victims and prevent further child abuse.