On the day of my scheduled interview with Imran Ahmed, The New York Times ran a new exposé based on the research of his advocacy group: the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
Their investigation found that Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok generated and shared at least 1.8 million sexualized images of women within nine days, including deepfake images of children.
The study only analyzed images from between Dec. 31 and Jan. 8.
“That was Elon Musk’s Christmas present to the world: a child-porn generator,” Ahmed said, memorably labeling it a “Mecha-Epstein.”
The findings aside, the fact that Ahmed and his group moved ahead with such a high-profile investigation at this moment is remarkable. Ahmed and his organization have been sued, smeared, and targeted by Musk and the Trump administration over the past three years.
For the better part of the past year, Ahmed himself has been explicitly sanctioned by Secretary of State Marco Rubio for his criticism of Musk: specifically, a separate study that showed the proliferation of hate speech on X since the company’s rebrand from Twitter. That investigation also led to New York Times coverage that sparked an advertiser exodus.
Rubio, without any trace of irony, labeled CCDH’s research “censorship” and sought to punish this speech by seeking to deport Ahmed, a green card holder originally from the United Kingdom who has a U.S. wife and children.
“The State Department said that I'm a threat to US foreign policy because I encouraged the European Commission to have transparency rules that they enforce — and that in the State Department's view, transparency is censorship,” Ahmed explained. “In order to fix that censorship, they need to punish me for my speech, which is the most extraordinary Orwellian nonsense I've ever heard.”
A federal judge recently dismissed Ahmed’s First Amendment case over those efforts — but on jurisdictional grounds, not on the merits.
Ahmed’s attorneys Roberta Kaplan and Norm Eisen are appealing the decision, and their client remains unbowed.
“I have two children,” Ahmed said. “Over the last week, I've had to ask myself a lot of questions because they are the most important thing in my life.”
Beyond their physical and emotional protection, Ahmed said he is also considering what his daughters will learn about their father a decade from now.
“I don't want them to see that when I was faced with injustice, I ran or begged forgiveness from those trying to promulgate that injustice,” he said. “Instead, I stood up and said, ‘I'm sorry. I'm going to carry on doing exactly what I was doing.’”
Watch my full interview on the All Rise News playlist on Legal AF.
Paid subscribers can watch that and other videos ad-free below.
Also featured in this week’s rewind:
* Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse talks Trump, Russia and Epstein.
* Nevada Secretary of State discusses election protection.
