Creating sexually explicit deepfake images to be made offence in UK

Instead of looking for those answers in the text of Farris’ summary of the law, we should look at the text of the law itself.

Edit: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3511/publications probably has the text we're looking for, somewhere.

I think the issue here is the between consenting adults part, deepfakes in this instance are probably not between consenting adults. I also think it's important to think about the reality of how this likely plays out. If someone deepfakes me and faps and I never find out and they never tell anyone, it would be quite hard for there to be action. So if someone is deepfaking you and you know about it, there must be a logical path there, and none of them look good for the deepfaker. Can't say I know where I land on the issue, and I've thought about it for days and hours.

I feel like "without consent" to be pretty key here.

For example, cooking meth.

I do think the other examples you gave have one significant and fundamental difference - no one would mistake those things as being real. The problem with deepfakes is these have a similar social impact and capcity for harm as real nudes do, only there is no element of consent. You could ruin someones life quite easily with deep fakes, but not with your lewd poetry or sketches. So it seems reasonable to me to ban these with a blanket ban.

I would prefer we lived in a world where that wasnt neccesary, but for every technology you must imagine the most sinister and exploitative application and realise that someone will try that and worse. How do you even begin to combat deepfakes and the social problems they bring? how many bodies are considered acceptable until we get it right? Possibly, its best to over reach a little then relax the grip rather than to take it slow, given what is on the line for some.

Courts have previously deemed cartoon imagery of children to be equivalent to a real child, so considering the deepfake to be a real person that needs to give consent is not without precedent.

The implied answer here appears to be “no” and the reason this is deemed necessary is an emergent effect of scale of being able to do this at such volume and quality.

Saying you can’t draw porn of people without regard to implied authenticity or medium seems somehow more reasonable to me.

But creating an image that can be watched in the real world, is more than "thought".

Also UK: make above real enough that it has a term

that's some admirable British consistency. Unironically. Honestly.

When the world is prosperous, people tend to vote for more liberal policies. And when economy is struggling, people tend to vote more conservatively. So we see more authoritarian policies like these.

That's japan.

People can do lots of things easily and are prevented by the legal system. I don't agree with the part of the law that makes this a crime if it isn't shared (who is being hurt in that instance?) but using an argument that essentially says 'it is hard to prevent people from doing something so don't even bother criminalizing it' is nonsense.

Children younger than 10 need to be taught the concept of consent and privacy, and how upsetting it is for people whose privacy and consent are violated. It ties into cliques and bullying, too. Teens can be brutal in their bullying and fake nude pictures will be added to the arsenal of abusive actions.

Some of this stems from unrestricted usage of computers by minors who don't understand the impact their actions might have. Better parental tools and parents/guardians who take this topic seriously would be beneficial too. (I'm not arguing for some locked-down console instead of standard PCs, I just think that parents need to be able to know what their kids are doing online)

The word "just" here is doing a lot of work considering scale is usually the difference between something being harmless and dangerous. I think this is a blind spot with technical types as to the intent of the law. We ban things all the time that are easy to do, like shoplifting or graffiti. It's not a failing of those laws that marker pens are cheap and blank walls are everywhere.

Worth noting, I haven't read the proposed law in question and don't have an opinion on it yet. I just don't think the reasoning of something being easy means we shouldn't attempt to legislate it if it has demonstrable harm to society.

Consider libel laws. (Because, if you think about it, "explicit deepfakes" are essentially "visual libel" — scandalous claims made through visual rather than written "evidence.")

For a statement to be considered libellous, it has to be false, known as false to the writer/distributor of the statement, and written/distributed with an intent to cause harm.

But there's an implicit proposition there — that certain statements can cause harm. Which has its own requirements: for a statement to be potentially harmful, it has to make a claim that if believed would result in reputational damage; and it has to be convincing / be likely to be believed by the common man.

A statement isn't libellous if it's prima-facie false — that is, if nobody is likely to believe it.

Photoshopping someone's face onto some random person's body is easy enough to spot, that it has usually been considered (the visual equivalent of) a prima-facie false statement.

A deepfake is only bad insofar as it becomes increasingly impossible to spot the problems with it, and so becomes (the visual equivalent of) a prima-facie true statement — actual libel.

This law is about giving victims the means to combat the harm done to them

Not at all. Else the criminalisation would be of those services.

That's not how deepfakes work, since nothing is superimposed.

Models like Stable Diffusion build a training set out of several images of a face (e.g. with something like LORA), and reduce it to a set of algorithms. That algorithm is a sophisticated way of expressing "green shirt, black hair, large chin, etc" It's not actually storing photos of faces. It then unmasks a new face out noise using those blueprints. You can change the blueprints, for example, I could ask SD to give me an image with gigantic rabbit ears.

To a layperson it might look the same since the technology is so new, but it's not in any way analogous to a photograph, it's analogous to a painter who saw someone, wrote down some notes on a notepad, went to their studio and painted them. The painting might look realistic but it's not the same as the original photo.

And there are plenty of people hell bent on removing those that remain.