TL;DR

Jess Asato, the Labour MP for Lowestoft, gave evidence on AI safeguards to New York City Council on Monday 5 October, the Lowestoft Journal reported. She is suing Elon Musk’s AI company, which the paper calls SpaceXAI, over sexualised fake images and videos of her made by its Grok chatbot, and she criticised the company for sending nobody to the hearing.

A one-day trip

Asato flew to New York for a single day. In her testimony, she said she was pursuing remedies in the English courts for misuse of her private information and for breaches of UK data protection law.

She contrasted her journey with the company’s absence. “I made a long journey of 3,400 miles to be here, because AI needs to be safe around our world,” she said. “But I note that SpaceXAI couldn’t manage a trip of 20 minutes or four subway stops.” She later called its failure to attend “an insult to victims”.

Speaking after the session, Asato said the evidence in her case pointed to a design problem. “The evidence in my case suggests that Grok was not built with sufficient safety in its design,” she said, adding that her claim’s evidence suggests Grok “added sexualised content without any user prompting”.

The case so far

The trip comes in a case we have followed since Asato began proceedings against xAI. According to the Lowestoft Journal, High Court documents from July said she suffered a “gross violation of her dignity” through the images. Her lawyers argue she was “victimised” after she spoke out in January against Grok being used to create non-consensual deepfakes of women. She is seeking damages, and the paper says some of the material shared online showed her being sexually assaulted. Our earlier report covers what her particulars of claim allege.

Musk has said before that his platform would act on illegal content. The paper also notes that UK law now forbids both making and asking for deepfake images of adults made without their consent.

Looking forward

In our view, taking the case to a New York legislative hearing is a deliberate step from a single lawsuit towards international pressure on how AI image tools are built. Her argument that the harm comes from Grok’s design, not just from users, is a question her claim puts before the English courts. A ruling for Asato on that point would matter well beyond her own claim, for any company offering image generation to UK users.