Female British politicians have fallen victim to fake porn, with their faces used in nude images created using artificial intelligence.
Political candidates who have been targeted by the popular fake porn website include Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner, Education Secretary Gillian Keegan, MP Penny Mordaunt, former Home Secretary Priti Patel and Labour backbencher Stella Creasy. According to Channel 4 NewsMany of the images have been online for several years and have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.
Some of the images are crudely Photoshopped, with politicians’ heads superimposed onto the naked bodies of others, but some appear to be more complex deepfakes created using artificial intelligence techniques. Some of the targeted politicians have reported the attacks to the police.
Dehena Davison, who was a Conservative MP until the recent dissolution of Parliament, is also featured on the site. She told Channel 4 News she found it “really strange” and “quite illegal” that women like her were being targeted. If governments around the world did not put in place proper regulatory frameworks for artificial intelligence, she said, there would be “huge problems”.
Mr Creasy told the station he was “sickened” to learn of the images, saying: “This isn’t about sexual gratification, it’s all about power and control.”
Non-consensual deepfake technology, which takes photos of individuals and uses artificial intelligence to remove their clothes or create fake nude photos, has become a growing issue as part of the AI boom. Earlier this year, The Guardian investigated ClothOff, an AI app that encourages users to “use AI to remove someone’s clothes”. The app trades through a London-registered company and has caused confusion in some schools.
Thousands of female celebrities have already fallen victim to fake pornography. The site, which features a female British politician whom the Guardian did not name, hosts user-generated content and claims to only feature legal adult material.
Sharing such images without consent has been illegal in the UK since the introduction of Online Safety Bills in January, but sites hosting the material are easily accessible through mainstream search engines such as Google.
In the UK, creating such material remains legal; the government announced plans to close the loophole in April, Deepfake pornography production banned in England and Wales However, the bill was scrapped after Chancellor Rishi Sunak called an early general election, and the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties have all pledged to repeal the bill if they win the next general election, which would likely result in a ban on the production of images.
The UK has a tougher stance on deepfake porn than many other countries. This is already having an impact, with some of the biggest sites Pre-blocking UK users It is better to withdraw from the site than to risk potential legal repercussions.
US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is also pushing for similar legislation in the US, after she said encountering a deepfake of herself performing a sex act brought back past trauma for her and predicted that “people will kill themselves over this.”
