Channel 4 journalist Cathy Newman has described the 'dehumanising' moment she came face to face with an explicit deepfake pornography video of herself.
The investigation into five popular deepfake sites found more than 4,000 famous individuals who had been artificially inserted into adult films without their knowledge to give the impression they were carrying out sex acts. Footage aired as part of the report showed a clearly disturbed Newman watching as her AI-generated double crawled towards the camera.
Some sick apps also offer to remove swimwear from images - meaning anyone who publicly shares an image of themselves on a beach holiday, for instance, could find themselves maliciously rendered artificially nude. Advertisement Writing in a national newspaper, Ms Newman thought she would be 'relatively untroubled' by watching a video a twisted stranger had made that superimposed her face on that of an adult performer - but came away from the experience 'disturbed'.
Newman spoke to Sophie Parrish, who started a petition before the law was changed, after the person who created digitally altered pornography of her was detained by police but did not face any further legal action. Matters came to a head in January when singer Taylor Swift became a victim of deepfaking - after sexually explicit AI-generated images of her were shared on social media after being generated using Microsoft AI image generation software.
'So, we can legislate in this jurisdiction, it might have no impact on whoever created my video or the millions of other videos that are out there. Advancements in artificial intelligence technology mean deepfake videos can be made using just a single picture of a person's face - with the hallmarks of artificially generated images becoming harder to spot as the tech improves.
Advertisement Victims and safeguarding minister Laura Farris said: 'The creation of deepfake sexual images is despicable and completely unacceptable irrespective of whether the image is shared.