The UK government plans to crack down on explicit deepfakes, in which images or videos of people are blended with pornographic material using artificial intelligence (AI) to make it look like an authentic piece of content. While it is already an offence to share this kind of material, it’s not illegal to create it.
Where children are concerned, however, most of the changes being proposed don’t apply. It’s already an offence to create explicit deepfakes of under 18s, courtesy of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009, which anticipated the way that technology has progressed by outlawing computer-generated imagery.
