Urgent call to pass deepfake sexual image sharing laws

Criminal offences for those creating or threatening to share digitally altered sexual images of a person need streamlining and new laws to tackle deepfakes must be passed immediately, a committee says. Deepfakes involve digitally altered images of a person or their body, while AI can be used to generate an image based on a photo or to superimpose faces onto pornographic material. New laws proposed by the attorney-general would impose six-year prison sentences on people sharing non-consensual sexual images and seven years on those found to have created or altered the image under an aggravated offence. A Senate committee that scrutinised the legislation has recommended it be passed urgently. It will come before the upper house when parliament reconvenes on Monday. Between 90 and 95 per cent of deepfakes were non-consensual porn and 99 per cent of deepfake porn victims were women, it heard. "The women who came forward to give evidence made it clear that the impacts of this type of crime are prolific, horrific and can destroy someone's life," committee chair and Labor senator Nita Green told AAP. "We heard that women have been raising this for many years and this reform is long overdue." Explicit deepfakes have increased as much as 550 per cent year on year since 2019, the eSafety commissioner said. Victim survivors had called for stronger laws that addressed the creation and threatened distribution of such images, but government representatives argued such laws were not in the Commonwealth's remit. Attorneys-general should continue to work to harmonise laws criminalising such offences, the committee recommended, with Victoria the only state to explicitly outlaw the creation of deepfakes. "State and territory police would be able to investigate and prosecute perpetrators under Commonwealth offences as well as state and territory offences, increasing the prosecutorial options for police," the committee report noted. Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus welcomed the report and called for senators to pass the bill as soon as possible. "Digitally created and altered sexually explicit material that is shared without consent is a damaging and deeply distressing form of abuse," he said. "This insidious behaviour can be a method of degrading, humiliating and dehumanising victims." People with a disability, First Nations people, the LQBTQI+ community and young people aged between 16 and 29 were "heavily targeted" groups, the Australian Human Rights Commission submitted.