Deepfake porn: why we need to make it a crime to create it, not just share it

By Clare McGlynn, Durham University

Deepfake pornography – where someone’s likeness is imposed into sexually explicit images with artificial intelligence – is alarmingly common. The most popular website dedicated to sexualised deepfakes, usually created and shared without consent, receives around 17 million hits a month. The content almost exclusively targets women. There has also been an exponential rise in “nudifying” apps which transform ordinary images of women and girls into nudes.

When Jodie, the subject of a new BBC Radio File on 4 documentary, received an anonymous email telling her she’d been deepfaked, she was devastated. Her sense of violation intensified when she found out the man responsible was someone who’d been a close friend for years. She was left with suicidal feelings, and several of her other female friends were also victims.

The horror confronting Jodie, her friends and other victims is not caused by unknown “perverts” on the internet, but by ordinary, everyday men and boys. Perpetrators of deepfake sexual abuse can be our friends, acquaintances, colleagues or classmates. Teenage girls around the world have realised that their classmates are using apps to transform their social media posts into nudes and sharing them in groups.

Having worked closely with victims and spoken to many young women, it is clear to me that deepfake porn is now an invisible threat pervading the lives of all women and girls. Deepfake pornography or nudifying ordinary images can happen to any of us, at any time. And, at least in the UK, there is nothing we can do to prevent it.

While UK laws criminalise sharing deepfake porn without consent, they do not cover its creation. The possibility of creation alone implants fear and threat into women’s lives.

Deepfake creation itself is a violation

This is why it’s time to consider criminalising the creation of sexualised deepfakes without consent. In the House of Lords, Charlotte Owen described deepfake abuse as a “new frontier of violence against women” and called for creation to be criminalised.

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