Sir Keir Starmer has said a Labour MP was “absolutely right” to take legal action against Elon Musk’s xAI over “disgusting” images created by its chatbot Grok.
Jess Asato, the MP for Lowestoft in Suffolk, filed a claim at the High Court on Wednesday seeking damages and hoping to set a precedent for companies to be liable for the design of AI systems. The prime minister’s backing came after Asato said she felt “dehumanised” and “demeaned” when a fake picture of her in a bikini was produced by the tool.
“Sir Keir Starmer backed Jess Asato's High Court lawsuit against xAI over fake bikini images created by Grok.”
Asato was targeted in January after speaking up about Grok’s ability to generate false sexualised images. Amid a backlash at the time, xAI said users would no longer be able to use the tool to create sexualised images of real people. Since then, it has become illegal to create or request a non-consensual deepfake image of an adult in the UK.
“I’m really pleased that we took Grok on a few months ago, because that’s the fight we should be in,” Starmer told the BBC. “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 told BBC Breakfast she was taking legal action to “hold tech companies like Grok to account”. She revealed she had received “many images once again of me in a bikini” since news of her lawsuit went public.
“There are no social rules about how people’s images are used any more,” she said. “We need to be able to use the law to regain some sense of control.”
Describing the impact of the deepfake, Asato said: “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 added that others had described the experience as “some form of almost digital sexual assault”.
Asato has called on anyone whose image was 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,” she said.