It’s the show campaigners have called “so insulting, so gross”: Vicky Pattison’s My Deepfake Sex Tape. “We’re actually going to produce our own deepfake, of me. And release that on social media sites,” Pattison tells Cathy Newman, Channel 4’s news anchor, who herself found she’d been deepfaked while researching the issue. Newman is gentle, reserved: she advises Pattison (in so many words) to stay well away from the cesspit she’s about to create. But she doesn’t ask the obvious, insistent question, and she’s Cathy Newman! It’s like putting Nigella next to an oven and not letting her cook. Why the hell, Vicky, are you doing this?
The premise is so wild, and when you try to get to its rationale, it gets even weirder. Let’s just say it’s true, that the best way to land a conversation about deepfake porn is if it’s fronted by someone of whom deepfakes exist. OK, there are thousands of them; but now let’s say you urgently need to show the footage, well, of course now you can’t use a real victim, because that would exacerbate the harm you’re trying to expose and ultimately eradicate. So now you need someone to consent to being deepfaked, and whoops, now you need two consenting porn actors, to film the scene and fake the presenter’s face on to it. Pattison chatting to the male lead is vividly funny, her conviviality pulling the project apart in real time. “If people thought I could nick a fella that’d look like you, I’d be over the moon,” she says. “I’d be thrilled to ribbons.” But guys! If Vicky consents, and the fella consents, and the Vicky-alike other actor consents, and they all have agency, this is as near as dammit to the opposite of what deepfake porn is.
