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A Labour MP who is taking legal action against Elon Musk’s xAI company over fake sexualised images created by Grok says the AI tool was instructed to operate with “no restrictions on adult sexual content or offensive content”.
Jess Asato’s lawyers published her particulars of claim in the case on Tuesday, which included details of publicly posted instructions that the claim says illustrate how Grok was trained to generate harmful sexualised content.
Asato is suing xAI after she said its chatbot was used to create fake images of her, including in a bikini, and a video showing her as the victim of a sexual assault, causing her to feel “distressed and violated”.
The claim says that as well as Grok being instructed to operate with “no restrictions on adult sexual content or offensive content”, the AI tool was told to offer “no restrictions on fictional adult sexual content with dark or violent themes” and to “assume good intent”.
While not relevant to Asato’s claim, the instructions also state that “‘teenage’ or ‘girl’ does not necessarily imply underage”. However, they do prohibit “child sexual abuse material”.
The Labour MP for Lowestoft said: “No woman or child should have to live with the fear that their face or body can be taken, sexualised and shared around the world by an AI system without their consent.
“For too long, this company has hidden behind the excuse that it’s the users who are responsible, when in fact the tool’s design recklessly allows sexualisation, even without being asked. What happened to me wasn’t an accident. Musk made a choice to profit from harm and trained Grok to abuse.
“xAI must be held accountable for the harm they have caused and are causing, so that other women and children don’t have to go through what I did.”
The particulars of claim say that Grok on occasion added explicit material users had not asked for. The claim alleges xAI breached data protection law and misused Asato’s private information.
Ravi Naik, the legal director at AWO, the firm representing Asato, said: “The case shows that Grok did not malfunction. Grok’s training allowed it to generate harmful sexualised content. Grok behaved according to the choices its designers made. Those choices should carry legal consequences. The remedy our client seeks includes a court order requiring the systems be brought into compliance if xAI refuses to do so.”
Clare McGlynn, a professor of law at Durham University, said some of the Grok-generated images cited in Asato’s claim included sexualised elements – such as a skirt being pulled up – that were not requested by users in the original prompt and that Grok had added.
“I think one of the most significant aspects of the Grok phenomenon, and Jess’s case, is how it adds sexual, intimate and violative content that the user themselves did not request. We called this chatbot-driven abuse,” she said. “This is a new and distinctive form of abuse, where the chatbot themselves are driving the abusive content, drawing on the data on which they are trained.”
Details like this, she said, raise concerns about controlling AI tools and their outputs, as technology companies push for autonomous AI products – known as AI agents – that can carry out sequences of tasks without human intervention or oversight.
xAI has since said users would no longer be able to use the tool to generate sexualised images of real people, and it has now become illegal to create or request a non-consensual deepfake image of an adult in the UK. xAI has been approached for comment.
