British MP sues Elon Musk's xAI over Grok deepfake images

A sitting British lawmaker has filed a High Court claim against Elon Musk's xAI after the company's Grok chatbot was used to generate deepfake images and videos of her, the most direct legal challenge yet to emerge from a scandal that researchers say produced an estimated three million abusive AI images in a matter of days.

Jess Asato, a Labour MP, filed a claim against xAI, the company behind Grok, on Wednesday. This harassment started in January after she talked about Grok’s image-editing feature. This tool in Musk's social platform X lets users tweak photos using just text commands.

Simple instructions like "put her in a bikini" or "remove her clothes" made Grok create fake images of her. It got worse; people used the tool to make pics of her in bikinis and even an AI-generated vid showing assault. Asato posted on X, “This should never have happened, and xAI must face consequences.”

She described herself as "just one of the thousands of women and even children who have been the victim of abusive and sexualised AI deepfakes."

Researchers documented approximately three million sexualised images generated through Grok's editing tool in a short window before the controversy forced X to respond.

The platform said it would make changes to prevent the creation of sexualised deepfakes of women and children, but critics argued the response was reactive and insufficient.