Jess Asato, a Labour MP representing Lowestoft, has filed legal action against xAI over the creation of fabricated sexualized imagery depicting her through the company’s Grok chatbot. Her legal team published particulars of claim this week detailing instructions showing the AI system was configured to operate without limitations on adult sexual content or offensive material.
According to the claim, Grok was trained with parameters allowing it to generate sexualized fictional content with dark or violent themes while being instructed to “assume good intent.” The documentation reviewed by Asato’s legal team also contained a provision stating that terms like “teenage” or “girl” do not necessarily indicate underage subjects, though the system was prohibited from generating child sexual abuse material. The claim alleges that in certain instances, the chatbot generated explicit content that users had not requested, adding sexual elements independently.
Asato stated that no woman or child should face the prospect of having their likeness taken, sexualized, and distributed globally without consent through an AI system. She characterized the situation as a deliberate choice by the company to profit from harm rather than an accidental malfunction. Her legal representatives argue that xAI should be held accountable and that the company should be required to bring its systems into compliance through court order if it declines to do so voluntarily.
Clare McGlynn, a law professor at Durham University, identified what she termed “chatbot-driven abuse” as a distinctive form of harm in which the AI system itself generates abusive content beyond what users requested, drawing on patterns in its training data. She raised concerns about controlling AI tool outputs as technology companies develop more autonomous AI agents capable of executing task sequences with minimal human oversight.
xAI announced that users can no longer use the tool to generate sexualized images of real individuals. Additionally, creating or requesting non-consensual deepfake images of adults has become illegal in the UK. The company declined to provide further comment on the matter.
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