The Prime Minister has thrown his weight behind a Labour MP suing Elon Musk’s xAI over “disgusting” deepfake images created by its Grok chatbot – as other victims began coming forward. Sir Keir Starmer said Jess Asato, the MP for Lowestoft, was “absolutely right” to take legal action after the AI tool generated fake pictures of her in a bikini, as well as a video she described as showing her “being chloroformed and prepared for a sexual assault”.
Asato filed papers at the High Court on Wednesday, seeking damages and aiming to set a precedent that companies are liable for the design of AI systems. Her claim argues xAI violated data protection law and breached her private information, according to her lawyer, Ravi Naik, legal director of law firm AWO.
“PM backs Labour MP Jess Asato suing Elon Musk's xAI as new claimants come forward over Grok deepfakes.”
“This is the test case on liability for AI developers. Just as if you’re an architect and build a building, you have liability for that architecture,” Naik said. “Those that build and deploy AI models make design choices about how these models operate. This will be the case that looks at liability for decisions in those design choices.”
New claimants have already contacted Naik on Thursday after Asato’s case became public. Naik said he was acting for “multiple individuals” hoping to take action over degrading, non-consensual content generated by Grok. Many had struggled to persuade X to remove the images until they received legal support.
A “bikinification” trend went viral on Musk’s platform in January, with Grok generating about 3m sexualised images in less than two weeks, according to researchers who said it “became an industrial-scale machine for the production of sexual abuse material”. The tool allowed users to alter online images of real people with requests such as “put her in a bikini” or “remove her clothes”.
Amid the backlash, xAI said users would no longer be able to generate sexualised images of real people and later put the technology behind a paywall. It has since become illegal to create or request a non-consensual deepfake image of an adult in the UK.
But Asato said she had received “many images once again of me in a bikini” since news of her legal action went public. “There are no social rules about how people’s images are used any more,” she told BBC Breakfast. “We need to be able to use the law to regain some sense of control.”
She revealed that she had been targeted in January after speaking up in the Commons about Grok’s use. “I was by no means the worst victim affected but it made me feel dehumanised. It made me feel demeaned. My consent had not been gained and I had been stripped of my clothes without my consent,” she said. “I know, having spoken to many victims, they say they felt degraded, that this was some form of almost digital sexual assault.”
Starmer said: “I’m really pleased that we took Grok on a few months ago, because that’s the fight we should be in. Taking on some of these platform providers, some of these disgusting images… we won that. But Jess is right, she’s a parliamentarian, and I’m 100% behind the action that she has taken.”
Asato has called on others who have had their image manipulated by Grok in an “abusive or demeaning way” to come forward. “We want to show that tech companies cannot act without impunity, they need to build safeguards into their products so that people’s images cannot be used or manipulated by AI, to sexualise them without their consent.”