UK Politician Jess Asato Got Deepfaked. Now She’s Taking xAI to Court

Was there a particularly egregious example or incident prior to Grok when you became aware of deepfakes that really stuck with you?

There is a brilliant campaigner who goes by the name of Jodie. I think it was probably listening to the experiences of Jodie, who was deepfaked, and it was such an affront to her that somebody would do this, and then she found out it was actually a friend. Such a betrayal of trust.

These things destroy not just the individual involved, but often families and everyone around them too.

For people who don’t know, who exactly was Jodie? Is this a constituent of yours or someone who came forward to you specifically?

No, no, no. She's a very well-known campaigner on this issue. That’s not her real name.

I know it sounds obvious, but what exactly is nudification?

It is where you ask an AI tool to take the image or video of a real person and use generative AI to make that person either nude, partially nude, or engaging in pornographic acts. This is something that, because of the photorealistic nature of AI images, it has become increasingly hard to see what is a fake image.

It can often look incredibly, incredibly real.

So what was it particularly about the Grok scandal earlier this year that made you want to raise this in the House of Commons?

It was the fact that we already knew that you could stop this from happening by designing the AI tool to reject the ability to do this.

This was completely avoidable. That’s why I spoke out, but also because I’d just spent a year and a half campaigning to get a ban on nudification apps, and here was an all-purpose AI tool becoming a nudification app.

It just felt to me as though we were making strides in the UK, and then the world’s richest man and his product decided to turn the clock back.