NZ is criminalising sexualised deepfakes – banning apps that make them should be next |
New Zealand is changing the law to make sexualised deepfakes a crime. But this alone may not be enough to counter the rise in AI-generated fake sexual material.
This week the Deepfake Digital Harm and Exploitation Bill is set to go through its first reading, with support across the political spectrum. The amendment will make creating, sharing or selling sexually explicit deepfakes without consent a criminal offence.
It comes in response to the rapid spread of such material, including the rollout of Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot on X, which people used to digitally undress women and girls and generate potentially three million sexualised images.
New Zealand is not alone in confronting the problem. The United Kingdom, Australia, South Korea and the United States have already introduced or expanded laws to criminalise creating and sharing of non-consensual deepfakes.
Criminalisation is an important first step and brings New Zealand in line with developments elsewhere. But stemming the tide of sexualised deepfakes will also require regulation of the technology itself.
Deepfakes mostly target women
Deepfakes are AI-generated images, audio or video designed to make it appear that a real person said or did something that never actually happened.
With image-based sexual abuse, this usually means using AI to create convincing but fake sexual material of a person without their consent.
Sometimes, technology is used to manipulate ordinary photos pulled from social media into........