Channel 4 presenter Cathy Newman is among more than 250 British celebrities who have become victims of deepfake pornography.
It comes as part of an investigation from the channel which aired yesterday evening, following an analysis of the five most visited deepfake websites.
It found that 255 of the almost 4,000 famous individuals listed were British, with all but two being women.
Among them is the channel’s news presenter, Cathy Newman, who said she felt violated on watching digitally altered footage in which her face was superimposed onto pornography using artificial intelligence (AI).
I’m gonna go against the grain and no doubt be downvoted, but surely this is overblown compared to the level of actual harm it causes? They’re not real images, almost everyone is aware they’re not real images, they don’t have a negative impact on the lives of the victim beyond them being creeped out that people are perving over them (but again, everyone knows it’s not really them).
I can see it has the potential for leading to actual harm, eg a stalker developing worse behaviour, but I don’t really see that it meets the threshold in and of itself. It’s only slightly worse than doing something someone else doesn’t like or saying something offensive.
Does everyone know they’re not real? I’m not suggesting they are real, only that for all I know the quality of these fakes might be convincing.
Whether this story is “overblown” or not is subjective I guess but the victim’s being “creeped out” does seem like actual harm to me
Thee woman interviewed for the piece reckons it caused her harm.