The Online Safety Act 2023 (OSA 2023) is an important legislative step which reaffirms the UK’s commitment to regulating harmful online content, particularly against women and children. It provides much-needed protection and safeguards in an evolving digital landscape where women are disproportionately impacted by technology-facilitated abuse. A report by artificial intelligence (AI) firm DeepTrace, which conducted an analysis of 14,678 deepfake online videos, highlighted that 96% of them were non-consensual intimate content and that 100% of examined content on the top five ‘deepfake’ pornography websites targeted women.
This worrying trend cannot be allowed to exist in any democracy where the autonomy, dignity and voices of women are threatened because of malicious AI-generated content.
Deepfake crackdown
The Alliance for Universal Digital Rights defines deepfakes as ‘synthetic media that have been digitally manipulated to replace one person’s likeness convincingly with that of another. Creating deepfakes involves collecting real, everyday images of someone
