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This week, Elon Musk’s AI company sued the state of Minnesota over a first-in-the-nation law banning nudification technology.
The law it wants stopped takes hold Saturday. It bills the platform, not the user who typed the request, half a million dollars for every single nude image made of a real person who never agreed to it. Over nine days last winter, on Musk’s own platform, the bot ran off more than four million.
The House passed it 132 to 1. In the Senate nobody voted against. Governor Walz signed it in April.
Filed in federal court in Minneapolis with four days on the clock, the complaint calls it an overbroad, content-based ban on free speech and the tools of visual expression, in a clumsy attempt to prohibit nudification.
The tools of visual expression.
In 2024, six months pregnant, Molly Kelley found out that a close family friend had been lifting family photographs off Facebook and building pornographic images out of her. Among them, eighty more women, nearly all Minnesotans, every one somebody he knew.
The files stayed on his computer, so no law reached him. Kelley spent the next year calling those women one at a time to tell them what had been made of them. She made the calls herself.
It traveled out of the private folder and into the reply threads on Musk’s platform where strangers answered photographs of real women with five words for the chatbot, “put her in a bikini,” “remove her clothes,” they typed, and the bot answered in public underneath the woman’s own picture where her coworkers and her mother could watch it happen, and when the Times and the Center for Countering Digital Hate went through those nine days separately they landed in the same place, at least 1.8 million sexualized images of women, and by then it was in the schools.
Westfield, New Jersey, October 2023. Tenth-grade girls tell administrators that boys in their class made explicit images of them and are passing them around. Quietly, administrators take the boys aside. The office calls the girls out by name, over the intercom, in front of the school. Francesca Mani was fourteen. And this happened to more than thirty girls. Most never saw the images and nobody was charged.
Fourteen-year-old boys did this, at lunch, with a free app and a yearbook photo.
A case in California says a man took one picture of his stepdaughter asleep on a couch at eleven, in an oversized panda shirt, and ran seven thousand images off it.
Somebody who loved her handed every one of those photos over, out of a Facebook album, off a couch on a Sunday afternoon, out of a yearbook shot in a gymnasium by a man with a comb in his pocket telling a fifteen-year-old to lift her chin. Everybody in those frames trusted that their image would never be altered into the stuff of a nightmare.
The friend was close enough to be family, and the stepfather lived in the house, and the boys sat two rows over in third period. And every one of them had already been let in the door.
This has happened in a Minnesota courthouse before.
The Rialto sat on Lake Street, a neighborhood movie house where kids got dropped off on Saturdays. Two brothers named Ferris and Edward Alexander bought it in 1969. And within a few years it was running Deep Throat, a bookstore had opened beside it, and the marquee that used to advertise matinees carried that instead, at eye level, on the street where those kids waited for the bus.
Deep Throat cost under fifty thousand dollars and grossed tens of millions. Across the country, twenty-three states banned it. On March 1, 1973, Joel Tyler, a Manhattan criminal court judge, ruled it obscene in an opinion long enough to need an appendix, calling the picture “this feast of carrion and squalor,” “a nadir of decadence,” “a Sodom and Gomorrah gone wild before the fire.”
Women in South Minneapolis picketed the block for years and moved nothing. In 1983 they went to Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, who were teaching a course on pornography at the University of Minnesota, and the city council hired the two of them to write an ordinance.
The duo wrote it as sex discrimination, which widened who was allowed to sue. Not only the woman photographed or filmed. Any woman. They argued that the harm spread past the one in the picture, that it reached every woman who walked past that marquee on her way to the bus, or worked under men who spent lunch hours inside, or raised a daughter in a city where that was for sale on Lake Street.
The council heard testimony on December 12 and 13. Women came in off Lake Street and told the committee what had been done to them and what had been made of them, and the transcript ran long enough that it was later published as a book, every word verified. Some of the women are named in it. Most appear as unidentified speaker.
On December 30 the council voted it through, seven to six.
But six days later Mayor Donald Fraser vetoed it. He never said the women were lying. His objection was that it would not survive a court. In July they passed it again, and again he vetoed it.
Indianapolis passed it too, and in 1985 Frank Easterbrook, a new Reagan appointee to the Seventh Circuit, wrote that the court accepted the premises of the law. Depictions of subordination perpetuate subordination. The subordinate status that follows, he wrote, leads to “affront and lower pay at work, insult and injury at home, battery and rape on the streets.”
But the harm, he reasoned, was evidence of how powerfully the pictures spoke. Then he struck it down. The Supreme Court let that stand without argument.
Women testified that a picture was a thing done to them. A court believed them and ruled against them anyway.
Forty-three years later the same state says it again, and this time the vote was not close.
But ask it the other way. If a man in Minneapolis had walked up to eighty women he knew and put his hands on them, would anybody be arguing about expression?
No.
Minnesota needed a definition of a nude image and went and got one out of the state’s sexual assault code. Under section 609.341: primary genital area, groin, inner thigh, buttocks, breast.
Those five words sit in that statute for one reason. They tell a judge where a man’s hands are not allowed to go.
The company calls that sloppy drafting. Minnesota borrowed it deliberately. The state is saying that when a man makes a nude image of a woman who never agreed, the question is not what he published. The question is what he touched.
The statute never says woman. It says intimate part, and the complaint never says a picture of a girl, it says the tools of visual expression, and the renaming is the defense.
Now the picture arrives with no room behind it. And the injury sits exactly where it always sat.
Women who posed naked for painters would not let themselves be photographed naked. Same room, same hour, same body. Their consent covered a man’s hand and a week of his looking. It stopped at the lens.
The camera is gone. On the couch there is a girl in a panda shirt.
What comes back wears her face and belongs to a stranger. Which is why most of those girls in Westfield never needed to see the images. A girl learns before she is ten to carry a second pair of eyes and check herself against them, in hallways, in photographs, in the two seconds before she posts. Tell her the pictures exist and you have already done the thing.
Her family took that photograph to prove she was loved.
He lifted it, stripped it, and handed it back to her wearing somebody else’s want.
Somewhere in Minnesota there is a woman who found out from a phone call.
This country has spent forty-three years arranging the law so the shame lands on her and not on him. In 1984 a mayor in Minneapolis said a law like this would not survive a court. He was right the following year. The new one takes hold Saturday, and a company is in a Minneapolis courtroom asking a judge to prove him right twice.
The intercom said their names out loud in front of the school. Molly Kelley said eighty names one at a time.
One legislator voted no.
No one was charged.
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The Suit and the Law
CBS Minnesota broke the story, reporting the complaint filed Monday in federal court against Attorney General Keith Ellison, quoting the overbroad content-based ban language from the filing, and carrying Ellison’s full statement and Walz’s four-word reply.
https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/elon-musk-xai-sues-minnesota-law-banning-ai-nudification/CNBC notes that xAI is now owned by SpaceX and operating as SpaceXAI, reports the $500,000-per-image structure and the April passage, and carries Erin Maye Quade’s statement about ill-gotten profits.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/28/spacexs-xai-sues-minnesota-over-law-to-ban-nudify-apps-.htmlThe Next Web summarizes HF 1606’s prohibition on letting users nudify a real, identifiable person, the advertising ban, and the routing of penalties to services for victims of sexual assault and abuse.
https://thenextweb.com/news/xai-minnesota-nudify-ban-first-amendment-lawsuitTechTimes details the strict liability structure and the absence of any safe harbor or scienter requirement, alongside the 132 to 1 and 65 to 0 votes.
https://www.techtimes.com/articles/322027/20260729/xai-challenges-minnesota-nudification-law-no-safe-harbor-no-scienter.htmIBTimes reports the August 1 effective date, xAI’s own estimate that 100,000 images would carry roughly $50 billion in liability, and the challenge to the definition of intimate part.
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/elon-musk-spacexai-challenges-minnesota-ai-nudification-ban-1811380The Washington Examiner details xAI’s specific objections, including depictions of shirtless men, shorts, and swimsuits.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/technology/4668601/xai-lawsuit-minnesota-ai-nudification-law/Quartz reports the company’s position that without relief it would have no practical choice but to restrict Grok Imagine’s image-editing features once the statute takes effect.
https://qz.com/xai-sues-minnesota-ban-ai-nudify-apps-072926The text of HF 1606 at the Minnesota Revisor’s office, which defines a nudified image and adopts the meaning of intimate part directly from section 609.341, subdivision 5.
https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/94/2025/0/HF/1606/versions/1/pdf/Minnesota Statutes section 609.341, the definitions section of the criminal sexual conduct code, where subdivision 5 provides that intimate parts includes the primary genital area, groin, inner thigh, buttocks, or breast of a human being.
https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/609.341/pdf
Molly Kelley and the Scale
IBTimes reports that Kelley discovered in 2024 that a close family friend had used a nudification site on photos of her and roughly eighty other women, and that she spent two years lobbying while working full time, raising two children, and attending law school.
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/elon-musk-spacexai-challenges-minnesota-ai-nudification-ban-1811380The 19th reports the New York Times review finding Grok produced more than 4.4 million images in nine days, of which 1.8 million were sexualized depictions of women, and cites the Center for Countering Digital Hate on images of children.
https://19thnews.org/2026/03/women-girls-lawsuit-grok-ai-deepfakes/
Westfield
Education Week confirms that the girls were identified when the school called them to the principal’s office over the intercom, while the boys responsible were never publicly identified.
https://www.edweek.org/technology/why-schools-need-to-wake-up-to-the-threat-of-ai-deepfakes-and-bullying/2024/12MIT Technology Review dates the incident to October 20, 2023, reports Francesca Mani was a fourteen-year-old sophomore, and notes she never saw the image of herself.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/01/1084164/deepfake-porn-scandal-pushing-us-lawmakers/CNN reports Mani was among more than thirty female students whose photos were altered.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/04/us/new-jersey-high-school-deepfake-porn/index.htmlThe New Jersey State Bar Foundation describes how the images were made by grafting the girls’ faces from social media photos onto AI-generated bodies and distributing them in group chats.
https://njsbf.org/2025/09/16/new-law-regarding-deepfakes-says-take-it-down/
The California Case
Lieff Cabraser’s filing announcement contains Jane Doe 4’s account of the photograph taken of her asleep on a couch at eleven in an oversized panda pajama shirt, and the roughly seven thousand images generated from it.
https://www.lieffcabraser.com/2026/07/deepfake-victims-bolster-class-action-against-xai-add-stability-ai/CyberScoop reports Jane Doe 4 is from Wyoming and that her stepfather traded the images with others on social platforms.
https://cyberscoop.com/deepfake-csam-lawsuit-grok-xai-expands-stability-ai/
Lake Street
MNopedia, from the Minnesota Historical Society, documents the Alexander brothers’ 1969 purchase of the Rialto, the adjoining bookstore, their near monopoly on pornography distribution in the state, and the newspaper phrase empire of smut.
https://www.mnhs.org/mnopedia/search/index/thing/minneapolis-anti-pornography-ordinancePlaces Journal details the conversion of the adjoining hardware store into the Rialto Bookstore and the formation of the Neighborhood Pornography Task Force in Powderhorn.
https://placesjournal.org/article/the-long-fire-at-lake-and-minnehaha-queer-activism-abolition-minneapolis/Placeography records the Rialto’s address and the Neighborhood Pornography Task Force protests outside the theater.
http://www.placeography.org/index.php/Rialto_Theatre,_735_East_Lake_Street,_Minneapolis,_Minnesota_(razed)
Deep Throat
The First Amendment Encyclopedia at Middle Tennessee State records the 1972 release, the ban in twenty-three states, and Judge Joel Tyler’s 1973 obscenity ruling in People v. Mature Enterprises.
https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/deep-throat/The Boston Globe obituary of Judge Tyler quotes the March 1, 1973 opinion, including the feast of carrion and squalor, the nadir of decadence, and the Sodom and Gomorrah passages, and notes the opinion carried a long appendix.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/obituaries/2012/01/16/joel-tyler-judge-deep-throat-case/hbiQ0keQ0VW0y26CY035SL/story.html
The Ordinance and the Hearings
The Minneapolis City Council transcript of the December 12 and 13, 1983 Government Operations Committee hearings, published as Pornography and Sexual Violence: Evidence of the Links.
https://books.google.com/books/about/Pornography_and_Sexual_Violence.html?id=7wjaAAAAMAAJHarvard University Press published the hearings as In Harm’s Way, covering Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and Massachusetts, with each word verified.
https://hls.harvard.edu/bibliography/in-harms-way-the-pornography-civil-rights-hearingsMargaret Baldwin’s contemporaneous analysis of the ordinance in Law & Inequality at the University of Minnesota, published in 1984.
https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/lawineq/vol2/iss2/8
Hudnut
The full text of American Booksellers Association v. Hudnut, 771 F.2d 323, including Easterbrook’s acceptance of the legislature’s premises and the passage on affront, lower pay, insult, injury, battery, and rape.
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/771/323/379919The University of Chicago Law Review records that Reagan appointed Easterbrook to the Seventh Circuit in early 1985, months before he decided the case.
https://lawreview.uchicago.edu/publication/american-booksellers-association-v-hudnut-%E2%80%9C-government-must-leave-people-evaluation
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