Labour MP Jess Asato sues Elon Musk's xAI over AI-generated fake sexualised images

A Labour MP has taken legal action against Elon Musk’s xAI company after saying its Grok tool helped a user produce fake sexualised pictures of her, part of a wave of such images that flooded the social media platform X earlier this year.

Jess Asato, the MP for Lowestoft, said in January that seeing herself portrayed by the AI tool as wearing a bikini without her consent was “violating”.

In a claim submitted to the high court in London, Asato said xAI – now a subsidiary of SpaceX, which also owns X – breached laws connected to data protection and the misuse of private information by letting users of the site prompt Grok to create such images, according to the Financial Times.

Asato told the newspaper that as well as creating images of her in a bikini, Grok also produced a video “showing her being chloroformed and prepared for a sexual assault”.

Her legal case follows a similar lawsuit filed in New York state by Ashley St Clair, the mother of one of Musk’s children. She alleged explicit images were also generated of her by Grok, including one image in which she was underage.

Asato’s attempt to sue xAI could become a test case for how much such tools and their creators can be held responsible for what users produce with them. She told the FT that the images of her were generated after she condemned the creation of such non-consensual sexualised pictures.

She said: “My hope is that this will rebalance individuals’ rights against very large tech companies that should have put safeguards in place before they harmed women and children.”

Ravi Naik, the lawyer representing Asato, told the paper: “At its heart this case is about a single principle: that developers must answer for the way they design and deploy their tools.

“Our case is that … an image that is of you, is designed to look like you and [whose] very purpose is to degrade you or have you represented in different conditions, must be an image of you. xAI say otherwise.”

The UK government threatened action against X in January after Grok was used to produce vast quantities of sexualised imagery based on real women – and in some cases, children. The media regulator, Ofcom, launched an inquiry.

Musk’s company initially said it would change the system to only allow paying customers on X to produce such imagery, something condemned by Keir Starmer as “horrific”. Days later, X said it had entirely stopped Grok from editing pictures of real people to show them in revealing clothes.

Downing Street, government departments and many MPs have remained on X despite calls for them to quit the app due to images created by Grok and also Musk’s embrace of far-right causes in the UK and predictions of political violence.