Experts Warn Against Hasty Deepfake Porn Laws

Australia is set to follow its Anglo-Saxon mother nation in passing the most draconian deepfake porn laws in the world – or at least outside of China. Just as the UK has decided to criminalize the private creation of deepfake porn, so too will Australia. On top of that, those who share such material will face up to six years in prison.

However, according to Australian media, at least one legal expert has cautioned against the unintended consequences of such sledgehammer attempts to combat deepfake porn.

Professor Nicola Henry, a socio-legal scholar at RMIT University in Melbourne, supported the idea of having a specific criminal offence for deepfakes but raised concerns that children who didn’t fully understand the issue would be made vulnerable under the crackdown.

“I’m thinking about a group of school kids who might think it could be funny and don’t quite realise the harms or legal implications of their behaviour,” Dr Henry said.

“I feel like it’s more important to invest resources and money into education and also we need to hold accountable the social media companies for the content to be on their platform.”

On several occasions over the years here, I’ve warned against the adoption of knee-jerk legislation to address the perceived dangers of new sextech, something that seems is inevitable as the speed of advances accelerates. Hasty and ill-thought-out legislation will undoubtedly have unintended consequences further down the road. Not only will draconian deepfake porn laws criminalize lots of minors, but they will likely criminalize a lot of women too, as deepfake tech moves from refacing and undressing, to virtual lover experiences in VR or AR that involve not only deepfaked visual appearances but personalities too.

For example, in South Korea, most deepfake porn is produced by young men wanting to masturbate to their fantasies of their favorite female K-Pop stars. In another ten years, deepfaked VR K-Pop ‘boyfriends’ might be just as popular among young women – and just as illegal.

Professor Nicola Henry is also quoted as saying :

“Unfortunately, there’s not a huge amount of research that’s been done to examine the extent or the impacts of deepfakes or AI-generated image-based abuse. I do think it’s important to have laws in place, but it’s not going to solve this.”

I recently highlighted another academic’s argument that deepfake porn does not require any new laws at all. And late last year, the British conservative write Sam Leith argued that deepfake porn was an unavoidable part of 21st century life.

Featured image generated with PornJoy.ai