‘Form of violence’: Across globe, deepfake porn targets women politicians

WASHINGTON: From the United States to Italy, Britain, and Pakistan, female politicians are increasingly becoming victims of AI-generated deepfake pornography or sexualised images, in a troubling trend that researchers say threatens women´s participation in public life.

An online boom in non-consensual deepfakes is outpacing efforts to regulate the technology globally, experts say, with a proliferation of cheap artificial intelligence tools including photo apps digitally undressing women. The intimate imagery is often weaponised to tarnish the reputation of women in the public sphere, jeopardising their careers, undermining public trust, and threatening national security by creating conditions for blackmail or harassment, researchers say.

In the United States, the American Sunlight Project, a disinformation research group, identified more than 35,000 instances of deepfake content depicting 26 members of Congress -- 25 of them women -- across pornographic sites.

A study published by the group last month showed that nearly one in six women in Congress have been victims of such AI-generated imagery.“Female lawmakers are being targeted by AI-generated deepfake pornography at an alarming rate,” said Nina Jankowicz, chief executive of the ASP. “This isn´t just a tech problem -- it´s a direct assault on women in leadership and democracy itself.”ASP did not release the names of the female lawmakers depicted in the imagery to avoid public searches, but it said it privately notified their offices.

In Pakistan, AFP´s fact-checkers debunked a deepfake video that showed lawmaker Meena Majeed publicly hugging an unrelated male minister, an act culturally deemed immoral in a conservative Muslim-majority nation.In a separate episode, Azma Bukhari, the information minister of the Pakistani province of Punjab, said she felt “shattered” after discovering a deepfake video online that superimposed her face on the sexualized body of an Indian actor.