Just when you think the election campaign can’t get any madder, it does. Now it transpires that a ‘deepfake’ porn site has posted a slew of doctored images bearing the likenesses of 30 female politicians – including deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner to senior Tory Penny Mordaunt. You couldn’t make it up…
The targets of the dodgy photos – produced using artificial intelligence – are not confined to one particular party. As well as Rayner and Mordaunt, an investigation by Channel 4 News found that outgoing Tory Dehenna Davison and left-wing Labour candidate Stella Creasey were also featured. Davison has slammed the revelations as ‘disturbing’ and ‘violating’, while vocal feminist campaigner Creasey raged:
I felt absolutely sick to my stomach when you contacted me to let me know. It’s a form of sexual abuse. I am in the position where obviously I had to tell my partner about it because none of this is about sexual pleasure, it’s all about power and control.
Creating a sexually explicit deepfake image was to be made a criminal offence by the government in April, as an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill, but progress on this was curtailed by the dissolution of parliament the following month. The safeguarding minister Laura Farris has since promised that the Conservatives would continue ahead with the legislation if they win the election, while Sir Keir’s Labour lot and the Lib Dems would also support the Criminal Justice Bill.
The chairman of the Electoral Commission John Pullinger warned only months ago that deepfake pornography could come up in the 2024 campaign and it appears that predictions about 2024 being the ‘AI election year‘ have certainly come to pass. At least there’s only one more full day of the campaign to go…
Comments