AN MP suffered a “gross violation of her dignity” when fake sexualised images and videos of her were created by Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok, according to High Court documents.
Jess Asato, the Labour MP for Lowestoft in Suffolk, is suing xAI for damages after the non-consensual images and videos, including some depicting her being sexually assaulted, were shared online.
She is seeking damages for the misuse of her private information and breaches of data protection rules, as well as a court order requiring the company to find and remove any images of her that remain online.
xAI is yet to file a defence to the legal action.
In court documents outlining her claim, published on Tuesday, lawyers for Asato claim she was “victimised” after speaking out against the creation of non-consensual deepfake images of women by Grok in January this year.
Marie Demetriou KC, for Asato, said the MP posted on Twitter/X on January 6 calling on Musk to “understand that using AI to strip women without their consent is sexual assault designed to degrade and humiliate”.
In the days that followed, several Twitter/X users prompted Grok to create “sexualised, intimate, grossly offensive, degrading, threatening, humiliating and/or discriminatory non-consensual images” of Asato, which were disseminated online.
These included depictions of her being sexually assaulted and harassed, fully and partially undressed, and being portrayed as wearing a Nazi uniform.
The barrister continued that a prompt submitted to Grok by one user told the chatbot to create a video of Asato surrounded by Pakistani men, one of whom “puts a chloroform cloth over her mouth and she passes out onto a couch, and more men crowd into the room”.
Another video created depicted Asato being sexually assaulted by a group of men, with Grok independently adding features to both videos without being prompted.
After multiple attempts to report some posts, Twitter/X refused to remove them, stating in March that they did not violate its terms of service, privacy policy or rules.
Demetriou said that while two videos were later removed, six of 21 posts reported in February remained live as of late July.
She continued that Asato had suffered “significant distress, anxiety, alarm and intrusion and loss of autonomy and control over her private information and personal data”.
Demetriou also said that xAI was responsible for Grok’s “behaviour, capabilities and constraints” but that it “removed, disabled and/or weakened” limits on Grok creating sexualised and discriminatory images of adults.
She said that the company also introduced a service named “spicy mode”, meaning Grok users could prompt the chatbot to produce further “sexualised and/or grossly offensive content”, and changed its policy in January so that this was only available to paying Grok subscribers.
She continued that Grok was told to “assume good intent” on the part of the person inputting the prompts to create such images.
xAI has since said users would no longer be able to use the tool to generate sexualised images of real people, and it has since become illegal to create or request a non-consensual deepfake image of an adult in the UK.
But Demetriou said that xAI has “failed and is failing” to prevent the continued creation of such images by the chatbot, “took no steps whatsoever” to remove the images of Asato until after she had contacted the platform, and wrongly dismissed claims that Grok could create such images as “legacy media lies”.
She said: “The defendant has persistently and deliberately failed to apologise to the claimant for the distress and loss of autonomy and dignity she experienced as a result of the creation, generation, publication and dissemination of the non-consensual manipulated images of the claimant.
“Notwithstanding the absence of any lawful basis for creating, generating, publishing and disseminating the non-consensual manipulated images of the claimant, the defendant is continuing to retain and use such images to train and develop Grok in order to generate profit and pursue the defendant’s own commercial interests.”
A hearing in the claim is yet to take place.
