Jess Asato, the 45-year-old Labour MP for Lowestoft, is no stranger to online abuse. “It’s just such a big part of what you have to deal with,” she says. “I’ve had people say, ‘You’ll be the first up against the wall when it comes to judgment day.’ I’ve had people send me pictures of handguns. And then lots of just gendered language: bitch, sl*t, wh***. It’s nothing unusual. You can go on any female MP’s account today and you will see all of that happening in front of you.”
It’s a depressing reality that female MPs bear the brunt of online abuse. More than 4,000 crimes against MPs have been reported since 2019, with female and ethnic minority MPs subjected to the greatest number of threats, according to a report by the Joint Committee on Human Rights. Earlier this month, a 59-year-old man was convicted of sending a “grossly offensive” email to Asato, in which he threatened that she and her children would die “horrendous deaths”.
But earlier this year, Asato found herself the victim of a new kind of online abuse that made her feel deeply violated. After speaking up in January about xAI and Grok being used to create millions of non-consensual intimate images of women and even children, Asato became a victim of exactly what she was calling out.
“It started with people asking Grok to put me in bikinis,” explains Asato, who was confronted with AI-altered images of herself in the swimwear. She tried to laugh it off with her team, but admits: “I was making light of what was a really demeaning situation because I would never put an image of myself like that online. Nobody should be able to manipulate somebody’s picture from their X profile into something that strips a woman of her clothes. That is violating.”
It’s why Asato is now taking legal action against Elon Musk’s xAI over the images created of her by the chatbot Grok. “I’m suing to say that I, and my lawyers, believe that xAI has contravened data protection and privacy law, and when somebody contravenes the law, they should be held accountable for it,” she says.
Asato had previously spent years campaigning against deepfake pornography and image-based abuse of women, so she wasn’t exactly surprised by what happened to her. But it did affect her. “A lot of the women that I’ve spoken to before about deepfake imagery have said that they felt violated, and I’ve taken them at their word, and that’s how I felt,” she explains. “It’s because your image has been taken without your consent by somebody – often somebody you don’t know – and it has been manipulated.”
But the “worst thing” that happened to her was when her image was manipulated into a video by AI. “I was being chloroformed by a group of men. I faint, and then my skirts are lifted up – not to the extent where it’s intimate, but clearly insinuating some form of sexual assault. That was deeply concerning.” She also adds that all online abuse is frightening – “anybody who is threatening you or using deeply abusive gendered language feels scary”.
When Asato went on the BBC to talk about how demeaning and violating the experience was, trolls created more AI images of her in a burqa, saying “would you prefer this?” as well as making her pregnant with quintuplets in a kitchen. “Clearly, that is the only place that women really should be,” says Asato wryly. “It’s still misogynistic. That’s the point. It’s like they’re saying, ‘Shh, we can do anything we want to.’ And it’s also the racial undertones of that too, which is that somehow you are worth nothing to us and we can manipulate you in whatever way we want to for our own gratification.”
In February, UK law changed to make it a criminal offence for anyone to create sexually explicit deepfake images of adults without their consent. But Asato doesn’t believe that goes far enough, pointing out that the bikini-altered images of her would not be classified as “intimate imagery”. “My guiding principle has always been that what is illegal or regulated offline should be illegal and regulated online. As I say, one of my principles is that nobody would be able to strip me into a bikini in the street, and they shouldn’t be allowed to do that online either.”
Her case against xAI was filed at the High Court earlier this month, and she is seeking damages but also wants to set a precedent for companies to be liable for the design of AI systems. “I’m doing this on behalf of all of the victims who underwent sexualisation because of Grok, and that’s who I centre in my decision-making. This isn’t really about me; this is about making sure that we can hold xAI accountable for what it did to thousands of real women and children.”
The Claim Form has not yet been sent to xAI – the company was approached for comment but did not respond before publication – so it will be a few months before the company’s official response to the claim is known.
She’s aware that she’s privileged to be able to take legal action – her lawyers are working on a “no-win, no-fee” basis – and she hopes her case means that others won’t have to sue. “This is the thing – bringing a case like this against the richest man in the world is something that most people would never be able to do… It’s a field that I’ve worked in for many, many years, and I just think, like so many people, I am fed up with seeing bullies win.
Nobody would be able to strip me into a bikini in the street, and they shouldn’t be allowed to do that online either
Jess Asato
“My intent is to hold them accountable for what they have done through our legal system and make sure that all tech companies understand that they do have these duties and they can’t ride roughshod over them just because they know that the vast majority of people would never be able to bring a case against them.”
Launching a legal case against the richest man in the world is no small feat and will doubtless affect Asato’s life not just as a politician, but as a woman and mother. But she sees it as her duty. “I am just one more person to whom this has happened. It’s just I have a voice, I’m elected, and I have a position in parliament, and therefore I’m duty-bound to use that voice and position to further the interests of everyone else.”
While Asato’s case focuses on sexualised images, she also stresses that image-based abuse doesn’t have to be sexual to be harmful. A report from global charity Chayn, looking at image-based abuse in Pakistan and the diaspora, recently found that manipulated images showing females without hijabs or dancing in a nightclub have been used to threaten, blackmail and harm women.
“That’s why I think we need to sort of refocus [the law] on the idea of consent,” says Asato. “It’s to do with whether we consent to our images being manipulated or shared, even when they’re not intimate images, because of the impact that that could have on the person.”
She hopes her legal battle will lead to changes in the law – and in how tech companies are held accountable for their products. “There has been recent research that shows that it is still possible to use Grok to create sexualised images of women,” says Asato, pointing out that this comes after Musk’s commitment in January that this would no longer be possible.
“So you’ve got to ask, in the end, can we trust these huge tech companies backed by billions to really lean in to make safe products? These products do not have safety by design, and it’s about time that companies, no matter where they’re based across the world, respect the laws of our country and put the safety of women and children at the heart of what they’re developing.”
Until that becomes a reality, Asato is going to keep on fighting.
