Love Island star from Hull leads campaign to criminalise sexually explicit deepfake images

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has allowed people to make imitation porn using real people’s likenesses.

A Channel 4 investigation found hundreds of actors, TV stars and musicians have become the victim of this, known as deepfakes.

Former Love Island contestant Cally Jane Beech, an activist from Hull, discovered an explicit, digitally altered image of herself on a website.

She told ITV: “I was just contacted out of the blue and someone said ‘There’s an explicit image of you’, and I said ‘Well, that can’t be true’, because I knew I hadn’t taken anything like that.

“And they said ‘It’s on Google’, so I asked them to send me the link so I could have a look, opened it and, to my surprise, there was there an image of me.

“I knew it wasn’t real because I had the original photo and it was for an underwear campaign – but the underwear wasn’t there.”

The 33-year-old found where the site was being hosted and said it advertised that it could strip women’s clothes when users upload images.

“And that’s when I found out where the real issue was, took to my social media, spoke out on there about it,” she said.

“And then a lot of people came rushing forward and said ‘This is a major problem’, but it was never something I realised was an issue until that point, how big it was and how many people contacted me.”

Asked how it felt to discover the images, she said: “I think it was a bit of mixed emotions. At first I was just a bit in shock, I wasn’t quite sure what to feel.”

Beech said she realised it could happen to her daughter and was told that paedophiles have been “using this AI technology for their own access as well”.

The Government has created a new deepfakes offence, which will criminalise people who are both creating and sharing these images.

This builds on offences aimed at clamping down on the sharing of intimate images, including deepfakes, introduced in 2023.

Those who take intimate images of other people without their consent, or who install equipment to take these pictures, could meanwhile face up to two years behind bars under additional new offences.

Justice minister Alex Davies-Jones said perpetrators of the new offences would “face the full force of the law”.