Faced with the growing problem represented by pornographic deepfakes, the Government is taking the necessary measures. A bill provides for up to three years’ imprisonment for the publication of these montages.

Faced with the growing problem represented by pornographic deepfakes, the Government is taking the necessary measures. A bill provides for up to three years’ imprisonment for the publication of these montages.

Artificial intelligence is an incredible technology, but terribly dangerous, and deepfakes are not going to make us say the opposite! Indeed, these images – photos or videos – use AI to superimpose a face on another face – and therefore reproduce “fake” people. If they are used in the world of cinema – to bring back deceased actors for example – and can be entertaining – as on the Snapchat application –, they can also be used for malicious purposes, to the point of becoming a real danger on the internet. However, as deepfakes are capable of making anyone say or do anything, they are sometimes used for pornographic purposes, tarnishing the image of people whose identity has been stolen, who have no obviously not given their consent.

Celebrities sometimes pay the price, like the scandal that shook the Twitch platform in January 2023. The streamer Atrioc had shared his screen live and, in one of his tabs, pornographic deepfakes depicted famous streamers like Pokimane and Higa. More recently, the influencer Léna Mahfouf, alias Léna Situations, discovered her face on a naked body that did not belong to her. “They took an image from one of my videos and pasted it on a body that doesn’t belong to me. And there are so many chicks on the internet going through that”, she laments in one of her videos. The Minister Delegate for Digital, Jean-Noël Barrot, did not fail to react, regretting that the pornographic deepfakes are “a blind spot of our law”. However, a government bill is underway to remedy this.

Deepfake porn: a practice to be supervised urgently

With the impressive advances in AI, deepfakes, especially pornographic ones, are on the rise. According to a study by cybersecurity firm DeepTrace, 96% of deepfakes on the Internet are pornographic content. To make matters worse, applications allowing this kind of editing do not hesitate to advertise on social networks, making the creation of pornographic deepfakes accessible to everyone, including those who do not necessarily have the skills to make convincing ones (see our article). Worse still, these special effects are sometimes used to practice sextortion, with the blackmailer threatening his victim to distribute the pornographic content on the Internet if she does not give in to his demands (see our article). And that’s when he takes the trouble to warn her!

In France, deepfake is currently not specified in any law and therefore benefits from a gray area of ​​legislation. Alone section 226-4-1 of the Penal Code allows you to file a complaint when you are a victim of it, because “the act of usurping the identity of a third party or of making use of one or more data of any kind enabling him to be identified with a view to disturbing his peace or that of others, or undermining his honor or at his consideration, is punished by one year’s imprisonment and a fine of €15,000.” Section 226-8 of the Penal Code specifies that this penalty also applies to “the fact of publishing, by any means whatsoever, the montage made with the words or the image of a person without his consent, if it does not appear clearly that it is an assembly or if it is not expressly mentioned”. A sentence too light in the eyes of the Government, which intends to harden the tone.

In digital bill, adopted unanimously by the Senate last July, the Government added an amendment containing article 5 ter, which reinforces article 226-8 of the Penal Code on assemblies without consent, and punishes by two years imprisonment and a fine of 60,000 euros for any publication of a sexual nature. This penalty is increased to three years’ imprisonment and a fine of 75,000 euros, if the images used come from a photo or video published on social networks. The text will be presented for second reading in the National Assembly in September.