Jess Asato: Labour MP suing Elon Musk’s xAI over Grok deepfakes
Labor MP Jess Asato said she is suing Elon Musk’s xAI, claiming its Grok chatbot produced fake images of bikinis.
The Lowestoft MP confirmed he filed a High Court claim on Wednesday aiming to hold the company accountable for design decisions that enable AI to produce such content.
Ms. Asato is seeking compensation but also hopes to set a precedent for corporate responsibility in the design of artificial intelligence systems by advocating “better guardrails” for future technological developments.
Ms Asato told the Press Association: “My going public is so that we can invite people who may be victims of AI photo manipulation at Grok to come forward and seek legal help… to give people some sort of sense that they are not alone in this situation.”
She added: “Nobody can come up to me on the street and undress me and put me in a bikini and I don’t understand why someone should be able to do that to me online because the feeling is very similar, although not exactly the same.
“It’s like someone digitally robbed me without my consent.”
This follows backlash earlier this year over how AI tool Grok was used to create fake sexualized images.
Ms Asato says she was targeted after she spoke out in January and told the House of Commons at the time how Grok was used to create fake images of herself in a bikini.
Amid the backlash, xAI said users will no longer be able to use the tool to create sexualized images of real people.
And it has since become illegal in the UK to create or request a deepfake image of an adult without their consent.
But Ms. Asato said her claim was about compensation for “damages created while Grok was causing damage.”
“If you think about other products that may have been manufactured defectively, such as a car, it doesn’t matter if the cars are recalled, the defects are corrected and no further damage is done.
“It’s important that the vehicle was built with defects in the first place, and that’s the problem with Grok; it was built without the guards and guardrails that would have prevented this from happening in the first place.”
Security by design should be implemented in the online space as well as offline, he said.
“I guess that’s the gist of my situation, which is that it doesn’t matter how quickly things are repaired. Once the damage is done, the damage is done,” he said.
The case, which was presented to the Supreme Court on Wednesday, is being brought under the Data Protection Act and for the unfair use of private information.
Ms Asato’s lawyer, Ravi Naik, of law firm AWO, said: “Where there is a wrong, the law must provide a remedy, and this is as true of artificial intelligence as it is of everything else.
“No one should be subjected to abuse like this and no one should have to instruct a lawyer to remove such images.
“This content exists because of design choices made by engineers at xAI. It was created intentionally.
“This is one of the first allegations to test liability for the design of an AI system, and we aim to make clear that security cannot be an afterthought. Ms. Asato has shown real courage in stepping forward.”
xAI has been approached for comment.
