Deepfaked: ‘They put my face on a porn video’
BBCImagine if your face had been digitally edited into a porn video without your consent and then shared on the internet. One woman reveals the horror of it happening to her.
Scrolling through her Twitter feed one evening, Kate Isaacs stumbled across a disturbing video among her notifications.
"This panic just washed over me," Kate says, speaking publicly for the first time about what happened. "Someone had taken my face, put it on to a porn video, and made it look like it was me."
Kate had been deepfaked. Someone had used artificial intelligence to digitally manipulate her face onto someone else's - in this case a porn actress.
The deepfake video on Twitter - with Kate, who campaigns against non-consensual porn, tagged - had been made using footage from TV interviews she had given while campaigning. It appeared to show her having sex.
"My heart sank. I couldn't think clearly," she says. "I just feeling like this video was going to go everywhere - it was horrendous."
In the past, high-profile celebrities and politicians were the most common targets of deepfakes - the videos weren't always porn, some were made for comedic value. But over the years that's changed - according to cybersecurity company Deeptrace, 96% of all deepfakes are non-consensual porn.
Like revenge porn, deepfake pornography is what's known as image-based sexual abuse - an umbrella term which encomes the taking, making and/or sharing of intimate images without consent.
It is already an offence in Scotland to share images or videos that show another person in an intimate situation without their consent. But in other parts of the UK, it's only an offence if it can be proved that such actions were intended to cause the victim distress - a loophole which means video creators often don't face legal consequences.
Government plans for a long-awaited UK-wide Online Safety Bill have been under endless revision and repeatedly shelved. The new laws would give the regulator, Ofcom, the power to take action against any website deemed to be enabling harm to UK s, no matter where they are based in the world. Earlier this month, however, Culture Secretary Michelle Donelan said she and her team were now "working flat out" to ensure the bill was delivered.
Kate, 30, founded the #NotYourPorn campaign in 2019. A year later, her activism contributed to the adult entertainment website, Pornhub, having to take down all videos ed to the site by unverified s - the majority of its content.
Kate therefore assumed that whoever was behind the deepfake of her had been annoyed by her campaigning. She had "taken away their porn".
But she had no idea who that person was, or who might have seen the video. And while she could see that her face had been overlaid onto footage of a porn actor, the video was convincing enough that she worried others might not spot the deception.
"It was a violation - my identity was used in a way I didn't consent to."
Underneath the video, people began leaving streams of abusive comments, saying they were going to follow Kate home, rape her, film the attack, and publish the footage on the internet.
"You start thinking about your family," she says, holding back tears. "How would they feel if they saw this content":[]}