The Legal Battle to End AI Abuse – An Interview with Jess Asato MP

By Susan Galloway – FiLiA Volunteer
Photograph credit: Jessica Redmond-Withey Asato ©House of Commons/Laurie Noble

Jess Asato, MP for Lowestoft, announced in June she was taking Elon Musk’s company xAI to court. Susan Galloway spoke to Jess about the legal case as well as her wider campaigning to protect women and girls in the UK from online harm.

In January, Jess Asato discovered someone had used the generative AI tool Grok to create deepfake images of her in a bikini without her consent. This was after the MP had criticised the spread of deepfake pornography online and it was calculated to degrade and humiliate her.

It took a lawyer’s letter before X agreed to take down the images, which included an appalling video showing the MP being chloroformed and facilitated for sexual assault. In July, she filed a legal case against xAI claiming that, as her likeness is a form of data belonging to her, her data had been misused by xAI under the Data Protection Act.

She hopes her case will lead to new legislation preventing this type of AI abuse and holding tech companies more effectively to account.

‘I think if you care about the protection of women and children then you create products which protect women and children, you don’t create products which harm them,’ she says. ‘And Grok was designed to amplify sexual harms.’

She continues:

‘In the offline world, no-one could come up to me, strip my clothes off and put me in a bikini. That would be a criminal offence. Just because it’s pixels doesn’t mean that there isn’t an impact on me. I think that we should have rights over our images because it’s an extension of us.

‘I know quite a lot of women who’ve been victims of this who haven’t been able to move on in their life because it has been deeply traumatising for them. So part of what I’m trying to do with my case is to show that we can take a stand. We can say, “Enough is enough. I didn’t consent to this. I have rights. My data needs to be protected.”

‘It goes back to my feminist principles. It’s about consent. It’s my body, it’s my choice. My face is part of my body and what happens to my face should be my choice.’

Male sexual violence against women and girls online is a goldmine for tech companies, facilitated by our ‘wild west’ free-market approach to the internet and the rapidly growing technologies like generative AI that it supports. The Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen exposed how systems and products are designed to enable abuse as part of the business model of tech companies. In its turn, generative AI is creating entirely new forms of abuse and dramatically amplifying existing ones. However, the companies which own and direct these technologies are responsible.

‘Grok is one example of this,’ says Asato, ‘but there are hundreds of other similar AI tools. When Grok was designed by xAI,’ she explains,

‘it was told as a system that it should accept requests to make adult sexual content. Even adult sexual content with dark or adult themes. And Grok was designed not to inquire or check whether there was consent in the use of people’s likenesses. xAI made those choices.

‘This is the first time a case of this kind has been brought in the UK and I’m doing it because I think it’s incredibly important that when companies have broken the law and breached the norms of product development, and ignored the need to make sure that their products are “safe by design”, as stated in the Online Safety Act, then there must be a mechanism for redress.’ 

The MP is working on a legislative solution that could involve a consent box being inserted into the metadata of our own images, video or audio when we upload it. We would click Yes or No to consent to our data being used by AI. And then AI companies who have these generative tools would be legally required to recognise that consent has not been given for the upload of a particular image or video. It would be similar to the way we click a box to consent (or not) to cookies on a website.

‘It is technically possible, and it wouldn’t just help to stop the abuse of women and girls,’ she says. ‘It would also stop generative AI technology being used in many other ways by bad actors.’

For example, financial scamming, electoral interference and the incitement of violence and hatred.

Successes

Jess is confident that through organised campaigning we can change things. She points to the age-verification system introduced by the Online Safety Act to tackle harm to children through exposure to pornography. Ofcom research shows a significant reduction in the number of children in the UK able to access and view pornography in the UK on mainstream pornography websites since the Act came into force in July 2025. Key to this, she believes, was getting a very strong definition of age verification into law, which has allowed Ofcom ‘to be more muscular in going after the pornography companies’. 

The production of AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery is now a crime in the UK under the Data Use Act 2025 and the law puts the onus on the defendant to prove that they had consent to create this imagery. Under the Crime and Policing Act non-consensual intimate imagery must be taken down within 48 hours. Both these are waiting to come into force.

Another win is that, from November 2026, pornography showing strangulation or suffocation during sex will be illegal. A review last year found this was rife in pornography and had helped normalise this type of sexual violence against women.

‘Now no doubt porn companies are going to really push back, because this content is viewed by so many people and makes them so much money and it’s very rare to find pornography without strangulation in it,’ says Jess, ‘But I look forward to PornHub having to make sure that when it’s accessed in the UK there are no porn videos with strangulation in them. That’s going to be a good day.’

Power to Victims

However, there is much more that needs to be done, she thinks.

One is to update the definition of harm regarding AI image abuse. ‘Not all AI created abuse involves nudity or is sexual. It would not have stopped what happened to me, because images of someone in a bikini are not considered intimate,’ Jess explains. The organisation Chayn has spoken to women in Pakistan and in the Pakistani diaspora and says there is a gap that needs closing between what platforms, policies and legal systems define as harmful, and what many women around the world experience as harmful, for example images created of women stripped of their hijab.

The Ofcom code on Violence against Women and Girls (VAWG) under the Online Safety Act needs to be made mandatory so that companies have to follow it and Ofcom can hold them to account. Currently it is not mandatory. And a statutory definition of technology facilitated VAWG is needed.

It is also still far too hard for women to have non-consensual images taken down.

‘The vast majority of victims of this just walk away because they think that nothing can be done. Even when you try and report it, it doesn’t get taken down, so I think a lot of people just give up,’ says Jess.

‘Giving more power to victims to get that material taken down swiftly is really important, pending a review,’ she says, ‘and we need to put the onus on the person who posted the material to defend that they have the right to do this, rather than put it on the victim to prove that it contravenes the terms and conditions of the provider.’

Jess’s view is that we need new online safety legislation, both to tackle some of the emerging harms of AI and also to give stronger powers to the regulator or to set up a new regulator, possibly on the model of Australia’s eSafety Commissioner. A third-party advocacy body to whom victims could report directly, properly resourced, is something Jess and the women’s sector campaigned for in the Online Safety Act but failed to get.

‘At the moment, Ofcom cannot intervene on the basis of just one example, no matter how egregious,’ she explains. ‘A third-party advocacy body could amalgamate all the cases of this happening to women and children in the UK and take those to the regulator.

‘They’d be able to say, right, we have a cast-iron case that this company has breached the Online Safety Act, we’ve got 1 million complaints, we’ve got all of this evidence, now you should act. If that had been put into the Online Safety Act we’d honestly be in a much stronger position now.

‘So, from my perspective, introducing that third-party advocacy body with the funding that it needs to do its job, or giving an eSafety Commissioner the power to conduct investigations, to receive consumer complaints and victim complaints and amalgamate those – either way, that would be an incredibly helpful step forward.’

Action Now

Elon Musk’s company xAI has not yet responded to Jess Asato’s legal claim, which was lodged in July, and it may be a long time before the case is heard. Meantime, you can show your support and receive regular updates on Jess’s legal case by signing up to the Stop AI Abuse campaign at: saiacampaign.com.

Write to your MP too. Let them know that women do not consent to men taking our pictures and turning them into porn and want to have a new consent-based law that allows us to gain control back over our bodies in the online space.

If you have experienced abuse in relation to xAI or Grok, or any other online tools, please get in touch with Jess Asato: jess.asato.mp@parliament.uk

Organisations Offering Advice and Support

BlogMICHELLE KERWINViolence Against Women, Sexual Exploitation Industries, Government Policy