UK MP Fights Back Over Grok's Deepfakes of Her

A British lawmaker is taking Elon Musk's AI company to court over what she says it helped create: sexually explicit fakes of her. Per the Financial Times, Labour MP Jess Asato filed a claim on Wednesday in London's High Court accusing xAI—now a SpaceX subsidiary—of breaching data protection rules and misusing private information. Asato asserts that xAI did so by allowing users of its Grok chatbot to generate sexualized images and video of her, including a clip "showing her being chloroformed and prepared for a sexual assault."

"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," Asato says, per the AP. "It is like somebody has digitally stripped me without my consent." The case follows a similar lawsuit in New York by Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of Musk's children, who says Grok produced explicit images of her, including one apparently showing her as a minor, per the Guardian.

Asato's legal team frames the suit as a test of whether AI developers can be held responsible for how their tools are designed and deployed. The UK government has already threatened action against X after Grok was used to flood the platform with sexualized images of women and some children. Media regulator Ofcom has opened an inquiry, and X has since blocked Grok from editing images of real people into revealing apparel. British PM Keir Starmer says he's behind Asato's suit "100%" and that she's "absolutely right in the action that she is taking," per the AP.