A Labour MP is suing Elon Musk’s AI company over fake images of her ’wearing a bikini’.
Jess Asato filed a claim yesterday, alleging that Grok also generated a video of her ‘being chloroformed and prepared for sexual assault’.
The MP for Lowestoft claims the images were some of the at least 1.8million sexualised images of women created by Grok earlier this year.
Asato said: ‘Me going public is so that we can invite people who may have been victims of AI photo manipulation on Grok to come forward and to seek legal help… to give people a sort of sense that they’re not alone when this happens.’
She added: ‘Nobody would be able to walk up to me in the street and strip me and put me in a bikini, and I don’t see why anybody should be able to do that to me online, because the feeling, while it is not quite the same, is very similar.’
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Women told Metro in late December how Grok created explicit images of them without their consent.
In response to simple user prompts on X, the chatbot created photos of real people in revealing clothing and in sexually provocative situations.
More images flooded X for weeks, most publicly viewable on the Grok X account’s media tab.
Asato says she was targeted in January after speaking up on X and in the House of Commons about the issue.
‘Sexualising someone’s image without consent is digital sexual abuse and needs to stop,’ she posted on social media at the time.
The Centre for Countering Digital Hate estimated that 65%, or just over three million, contained sexualised imagery of men, women or children.
Musk insisted at the time that he was ‘not aware of any naked underage images’.
Regulators launched investigations into xAI, the tech start-up behind Grok, while some countries banned the app, which the UK considered.
xAI bosses initially responded by limiting Grok’s image-generation to subscribers, who could pay a premium for the feature.
But it later blocked the bot from generating sexualised and naked images of real people in mid-January.
It has since become illegal to create or request a non-consensual AI-generated image of an adult in the UK.
Metro has seen several examples of users asking the bot to place people into a bikini over the last week. It does not generate the image, but responds to the user in a post as if it had.
‘No one should be subjected to abuse like this’
Asato, who is pursuing damages, compared the saga to how a faulty car would be recalled by the manufacturer.
‘It matters that the car was produced with the fault in the first place, and that’s the problem with Grok, that it was created without the safeguards and without the guardrails to prevent this from happening in the first place,’ she said.
Her claim was brought under the Data Protection Act 2018 and for tortious misuse of private information.
Asato’s solicitor, Ravi Naik of law firm AWO, told Metro that the law must ‘remedy’ the trouble that AI technology can pose to people.
‘No one should be subjected to abuse like this, and no one should have to instruct a lawyer to get images like these taken down,’ he said.
‘This content existed because of design choices made by engineers at xAI. It is built deliberately.’
Naik added that the claim could be a test case, paving the way for companies to be held liable in the design of AI systems.
‘Ms Asato has shown real courage in stepping forward,’ he said.
xAI has been approached for comment.
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