Second NIU Student in a Year Accused of Using Grok AI to Make Child Abuse Images

A Northern Illinois University student is facing nine Class X felony counts after DeKalb County authorities say he used the AI assistant Grok to generate child sexual abuse material inside his campus dorm room. Alan Salazar was charged on August 18 and, despite prosecutors' objections, was granted pretrial release by a DeKalb County judge just one week later.

According to Shaw Local, the investigation began after the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reported an image to the DeKalb County Sheriff's Office on March 5. That CyberTip was connected to IP addresses associated with both Northern Illinois University and T-Mobile, and the NIU Police Department later told sheriff's deputies that Salazar's T-Mobile phone number matched the number tied to that IP address. A sheriff's deputy wrote that, given the nature of the photos and the IP address resolving to NIU, they were concerned there might be a child in one of the dorm rooms being used to produce CSAM.

Deputies say they found no evidence of a child actually present in Salazar's dorm room at Neptune East, 740 Lucinda Ave. Instead, per the court synopsis, they discovered nine digital files created using AI prompts — files that appeared to include phrasing authorities alleged could be interpreted as sexual, including the words baby girls, kid, girl, or boy. One of the reported images appeared to be a photo taken inside a dorm room.

Deputy Says Student Showed Them the Images

According to court records cited by the same outlet, Salazar showed the images to deputies and admitted using Grok — the AI assistant built into Elon Musk's X.com — to create them. He was charged with nine counts of producing child sexual abuse material involving children who appeared to be under age 13, charges classified as Class X felonies that could carry up to 30 years in prison if he is convicted.

Salazar's Lake County-based defense attorney, Jerald Novak, did not respond to a request for comment, the report notes. University officials likewise did not respond to questions about Salazar's current enrollment status. Salazar was given a no-contact order and is due back in court at 9 a.m. on October 1.

Judge Cites Pretrial Fairness Act in Release Decision

Associate Judge Stephanie Klein denied the DeKalb County State's Attorney's petition to keep Salazar detained pending trial, instead granting him pretrial release. That outcome reflects how Illinois' Pretrial Fairness Act, part of the broader SAFE-T Act, now functions statewide: money bail has been eliminated, and prosecutors must prove by clear and convincing evidence that a defendant poses a specific public safety threat or flight risk before a judge can order detention, according to Illinois Legal Aid Online. Under that framework, the severity of the charges alone is not enough to justify keeping someone locked up.

Salazar's case also arrives after the state updated its statutory language. Effective January 1, 2026, Illinois formally reclassified what had been termed child pornography under 720 ILCS 5/11-20.1 with the modernized term child sexual abuse material, according to DRD Law, LLC. Under that same statute, producing CSAM depicting a victim under age 13 is a Class X felony carrying a mandatory sentence of six to 30 years and fines between $2,000 and $100,000.

Second NIU Dorm Case in About a Year

Salazar's arrest is not the first time an NIU dorm room has been at the center of an AI-generated CSAM investigation. In June 2025, Hoodline reported on the case of Michael B. Erickson, a Batavia student arrested in his Stevenson Tower dorm room and charged with 21 counts for allegedly using an AI tool to alter photos of acquaintances, generating and selling more than 20,000 child sexual abuse images on Snapchat, according to the Daily Herald. Erickson pleaded not guilty to those 21 counts in July 2025 and was released with conditions pending trial; as of August 26, 2026, no trial date has been set in his case.

Two separate CSAM investigations rooted in NIU dormitories within roughly 15 months, both involving male students accused of using AI tools to generate explicit imagery, both triggered by NCMEC CyberTips, point to a pattern that extends well beyond a single DeKalb County courtroom.

Grok's Safety Problems Draw National Legal Fire

The platform at the center of Salazar's case has faced mounting scrutiny nationwide. Research released in January by the Center for Countering Digital Hate estimated that Grok generated roughly 3 million sexualized images over an 11-day span following the December 29, 2025 rollout of a one-click image-editing feature on X, including an estimated 23,000 images depicting children. xAI later restricted Grok's image-editing tools to paid X subscribers on January 9, 2026, and added further technical guardrails on January 14.

The fallout has moved into federal courtrooms. A class-action lawsuit was filed against Musk's AI company in March 2026 in the San Jose division of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accusing xAI of product liability, negligence, and privacy violations tied to Grok-generated non-consensual explicit deepfakes. In July, additional federal lawsuits were filed against xAI and parent company X Corp in Little Rock, Arkansas, alleging the company failed to implement basic safeguards on Grok's Spicy mode to prevent users from turning real photos of minors into AI-generated abuse material — litigation that followed criminal charges against a local photographer accused of using Grok to sexualize client photos of children, according to PR Newswire.

Salazar's case also fits a wider law enforcement pattern beyond Illinois. Earlier this month, Metro Nashville Police charged a 39-year-old resident following a NCMEC CyberTip alleging he used Grok to generate child sexual abuse material, part of what Hoodline previously described as a growing national enforcement pattern of municipal police making arrests tied to Grok-generated exploitation files.

Broader state data underscores how large a share of Illinois' prison population sex offense convictions already represent. According to Illinois Department of Corrections figures cited by DRD Law, LLC, 5,136 people were incarcerated for sex offenses in Illinois in 2024, accounting for 17.7% of the state's total prison population. Whether NIU will change campus network policies around AI tools, or how Salazar's defense might challenge the evidentiary weight of AI-generated prompts versus physical material, remain open questions as his case heads toward its October court date.