Sexually explicit photographs of Taylor Swift are all over the internet. Except they are not actually pictures of Swift: they are deepfakes created with AI technology. Still, the fact they are computer generated doesn’t mean the photos don’t look horrifyingly realistic – and it certainly hasn’t stopped people from gawking at them. One of the images shared by a user on X (Twitter) was viewed more than 45m times in the 17 hours before it was taken down.

If this story sounds familiar it’s because you’ve probably heard a variation of it before. Deepfake pornography is everywhere – according to Danielle Citron, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, there are over more than 9,500 sites “devoted to non-consensual intimate imagery”. It used to take hundreds of images of someone and an immense amount of computer processing power to create a convincing deepfake. Now you just need a couple of a photos of someone’s face and a phone app. While Swift may be one of the most recent, and most high-profile, victims of the technology, it has upended an enormous number of lives.

More specifically, it’s upended the lives of girls and women. While men aren’t immune to being victims of other forms of AI-generated imagery, deepfake porn overwhelmingly targets females. A 2019 report by cybersecurity company Deeptrace labs, for example, found that non-consensual deepfake pornography accounted for 96% of the total deepfake videos online and concluded that the phenomenon “exclusively targets and harms women”. In the years since the Deeptrace report came out that harm has only increased. There has also been an uptick in cases involving deepfakes of minors. Last year, for example, boys at a New Jersey high school........

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