Maricopa County suit challenges AI ‘influencer’ scheme built on scraped images

A petition filed in Maricopa County Superior Court in Arizona alleges that an artificial intelligence platform and related companies built a business model around scraping women’s social media photos and turning them into explicit AI-generated content without their consent.

The petition filed Jan. 22 by three women from Arizona and California identified under pseudonyms M.G., H.R. and H.B., names Beau Schultz and Jackson Webb, along with related entities CreatorCore, AI ModelForge, FAL – Features & Labels, Inc., and Phyziro, LLC, as defendants.

The plaintiffs are represented by Nick Brand of Donlon Brand Law Firm in Kansas City and Cristina Perez Hesano of the Perez Law Group in Glendale, Arizona.

“We want guardrails put in place on generative AI. The keys have kind of been turned over to the public without any safety precautions being put in place on large swaths of generative AI. And that is extremely harmful to people, and specifically women,” said Brand. “(What we want) is to try and get some of those guardrails in place, whether that’s through legislation or … whether it’s through a large judgment that would effectively tell people that the people want these (guardrails) in place.”

According to the petition, the women previously maintained public Instagram accounts that defendants allegedly “scraped” to create what the lawsuit called “indistinguishable AI copies.” Those AI-generated likenesses were then used to produce sexually suggestive and explicit content, including nude and “not safe for work” images and videos, without the women’s knowledge or consent.

For more than three years, Schultz and Webb monetized these AI-generated personas by posting provocative AI images and videos on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok to drive traffic to subscription-based adult sites. Consumers allegedly paid for access to explicit content and interacted with chat features that purported to be the women depicted.

In 2025, the defendants expanded the operation by launching AI ModelForge “Blueprints,” instructional materials that allegedly taught subscribers how to replicate the model. The materials reportedly included step-by-step modules on image generation, video creation, NSFW content production, social media setup and monetization strategies.

The petition states that screenshots within those materials depicted AI-generated versions of at least one of the plaintiffs.

The lawsuit further alleges that CreatorCore, a subscription-based AI platform developed by the defendants, was specifically designed to generate consistent AI influencers and explicit content, including the removal of clothing from otherwise fully clothed images.

It also claims that FAL provided the underlying generative AI models used to host and generate the content, and that the defendants selected those models because they allegedly lacked guardrails preventing the creation of explicit material. The petition alleges that several mainstream payment processors declined to work with CreatorCore due to its NSFW capabilities, and that Phyziro ultimately agreed to process payments despite knowing the nature of the business.

“We believe, or they (defendants) kind of boasted, that they were using 1,000 women, or creating 1,000 women a week with their generative AI platform — 500,000 images and videos a month — of unsuspecting women and girls,” Brand said.

The plaintiffs said they first became aware of the alleged misuse of their likenesses in July 2025 after AI-generated content of them went viral online, including one video that allegedly drew more than 16 million views. Brand said while Arizona does not have any existing case law specifically about unauthorized creation of generative AI images of nonpublic figures (There are laws addressing deepfakes of politicians), they are using a revenge porn statute. That statute does not directly address generative AI but “appears to include it.”

“We are turning over to a public a technology that they don’t fully understand, either how to use or how to digest after it’s been used. And I think that when you turn over a tool like this without the guardrails in place, you are catering to the bad actors. You’re providing the bad actors a tool to facilitate the bad acts,” Brand said of publicly accessible generative AI models. “I think it is going to be very difficult to find out you’re a victim, but I would encourage people to understand that there’s a support system there, and you didn’t do anything wrong if you’ve been victimized by this.”

Legislation was introduced in Arizona in 2024 that would have made it “unlawful to intentionally disseminate a deepfake recording or … including when the person that intentionally creates and disseminates the deepfake recording or image knows or reasonably should know that the depicted individual does not consent to the dissemination and the deepfake recording or image realistically depicts the intimate parts of another individual that are presented as the intimate parts of the depicted individual.” That legislation was vetoed.

The case is M.G., H.R., and H.B. v. Beau C. Schultz, Jackson T. Webb, Lucas R. Webb, CreatorCore, LLC, AI ModelForge, FAL – Features & Labels, Inc., Phyziro, LLC, and John Does 1-50, Case No. CV2026-002938.