New Bill Targeting Sexual Deepfakes Passes Lower House

The lower house of Parliament in Melbourne, Australia, on April 23, 2020. Darrian Traynor/Getty Images

A bill that targets the sharing of deepfake sexual materials without consent has passed the lower house of the Australian parliament.

This comes amid a rise in sexually explicit images and videos generated by artificial intelligence (AI) or other technology on the internet.

There have been cases where images of other people were used to create graphic AI deepfakes, raising concerns among lawmakers and the public.

On July 3, the House of Representatives passed the Criminal Code Amendment (Deepfake Sexual Material) Bill 2024 after it was introduced a month earlier.

This is a further step in lawmakers’ effort to crack down on the proliferation of such harmful materials.

While the new bill will target the sharing of non-consensual sexual deepfakes, it will not penalise the creation of that content.

People who share those materials without consent could face up to six years of imprisonment, while those who have both created and shared it would face a maximum of seven years.

The bill will need to pass the Senate before becoming law.

Politicians’ Response

Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus said the sharing of sexual deepfakes had been a serious form of abuse predominantly aimed at women.

“This insidious behaviour is degrading, humiliating, and dehumanising for victims,” he told the Parliament.

“The bill will hold perpetrators to account for causing harm through the non-consensual sharing of deepfakes and ensure Australia’s criminal offences keep pace with new technology.”

Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek said sexual deepfakes had worsened gender stereotypes and that the government needed to do more to deal with the emergence of new technology.

“The massive upswing in the use of AI is as profound as the shift that we saw in 2007 when the iPhone was introduced but only now is the alarm beginning to be raised,” she said.

“As a community, we’re not even beginning to grapple with what some of those effects might be. We’re just perhaps beginning to understand what the future looks like.”

While the Opposition expressed support for the intention behind the new legislation, it was concerned that the bill would bring about new legal issues.

“I am concerned in the current bill with the change or the removal of the definition of consent,” Liberal MP Nola Marino said.

“The law explicitly says, currently, consent means free and voluntary agreement, but the government has actually removed that definition.

“And there’s just a few issues that, given the real focus on the need to keep people safe and what will happen in the AI generated world, how will the courts actually adjudicate the consent rule if it’s not clearly defined in the legislation?”

Australia is not the only country that is introducing law changes to deal with the rise of sexual deepfakes.

In late June, several senators in the United States put forward a bill that would require websites to remove AI-generated pornographic images of real people.