Restore WA weighs in on action being taken against Deepfakes on social media

Principal Operations Manager for Restore WA, Katherine Ahluwalia, spoke to the BBC about deepfakes after the BBC reported that ‘Jess Asato, the Labour MP for Lowestoft, announced on Wednesday she planned to take legal action over “disgusting” deepfake images of her, allegedly created by the chatbot Grok on Musk’s X platform.’

The BBC article, What led Suffolk MP Jess Asato to go against Elon Musk?, details the personal experience that Asato endured when ‘an image of her was manipulated using AI technology so that she appeared in a bikini.’

When Katherine was asked about this issue she said ‘deepfakes were part of a wider issue related to social media.’

“What we’ve seen is a lot of stuff that people or young people are seeing on the internet … like the ‘manosphere’, pornography, social media included in that, is fuelling misogyny, which in turn will then fuel domestic abuse and other crimes as well,” she explained.

“You’ll see it nationally, there’s stats on it, the number of sexual assaults in schools, like peer-on-peer sexual assaults, is increasing year on year.

“So all of this is linked. You can’t separate it, and those sort of misogynistic beliefs do feed into domestic abuse and sexual assaults.”

The BBC article also shared a ‘report found that deepfakes had increased by 550% between 2019 and 2023.’

‘According to the Fawcett Society, a charity that campaigns for women’s rights and gender equality, more than 95% of deepfake content online is pornographic and “overwhelmingly” targeting women.’

‘Despite numerous approaches from the BBC for a request for comment in response to Asato’s action, xAI has not responded. Earlier in the year, however, action was taken by the company to stop Grok being able to edit photos of real people to show them in revealing clothing in jurisdictions where it is illegal, such as the UK. Musk himself said: “Anyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.”‘

‘Asato’s legal case at the High Court was filed on Wednesday. A future hearing will be set – the details of which have not yet been shared.’

Katherine also spoke on this topic to BBC Radio Suffolk on 05 June for the morning programme.

Read the original article on the BBC website – What led Suffolk MP Jess Asato to go against Elon Musk?

Cover photo by George King/BBC