In a ruling favorable to Elon Musk, the US judiciary has ordered the temporary suspension of a Minnesota state law that prohibited the generation of fake nudity images using artificial intelligence (AI).
This decision was issued by a federal appeals court while Elon Musk's company, xAI, contests the constitutionality of the regulation in question.
The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, located in St. Louis, granted an injunction request filed by xAI. Previously, a first-instance judge had denied a similar request made by the company last month.
The Minnesota law, which took effect on August 1st, stipulates that website operators, software developers, and other entities cannot allow users to create photorealistic representations exposing intimate parts of identifiable individuals, provided those people do not appear in the original photos.
Federal judge Donovan Frank had decided the previous month that xAI had not proven it would suffer irreparable harm by challenging the law, in addition to considering that the company had delayed excessively in requesting a precautionary measure.
In its appeal, xAI contested the judge's conclusion regarding the delay in filing the action. The company also emphasized that its Grok Imagine tool has 'strict protections' against producing sexualized or nude images of real people.
Additionally, xAI has initiated legal action against users who, according to the company, manage to bypass Grok's security systems to generate sexual content of people without their consent.
For its part, the state of Minnesota requested that the appeals court maintain the legislation in force. The state argued that the measure was implemented to combat the proliferation of material classified as 'an impressive amount of child sexual abuse material generated by AI products like Grok Imagine.'
Neither xAI nor the Minnesota government issued immediate responses to the requests for comment.