Mark Dreyfus says the law’s aim is to clearly show sharing and creating deepfake pornography causes harm and will be treated as a criminal offence.Mark Dreyfus says the law’s aim is to clearly show sharing and creating deepfake pornography causes harm and will be treated as a criminal offence.
“Digitally created and altered sexually explicit material that is shared without consent is a damaging and deeply distressing form of abuse,” Dreyfus said. “We know it overwhelmingly affects women and girls who are the target of this kind of deeply offensive and harmful behaviour. It can inflict deep, long-lasting harm on victims.”The change aims to enable the law to catch up with technology. Currently, it is not illegal to create a deepfake AI-generated or digitally altered pornographic image.
Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup The change is part of a suite of moves aimed at reducing the incidence of violence against women and addressing the role that technology, including social media, plays in spreading and normalising violent, degrading and misogynistic imagery and ideas.
On Saturday, Dreyfus said the government wanted users of technology to understand that it is not only the creation of degrading images without someone’s consent – whether depicting real people or created digitally – that causes harm but the act of sharing them.