Campaigners have welcomed the move, hoping it will afford better protection for women and girls. Cally Jane Beach, a campaigner and former Love Island contestant who was a victim of deepfake pornography, said: “This new offence is a huge step in further strengthening of the laws around deepfakes to better protect women.”

Expanding on her personal experience, Beach added: “What I endured went beyond embarrassment or inconvenience. Too many women continue to have their privacy, dignity and identity compromised by malicious individuals in this way and it has to stop. People who do this need to be held accountable.”

Another campaigner who commented on the news was Andrea Simon, Director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW). In a press release issued by EVAW, she stated: “We welcome the criminalisation of the creation of sexually explicit deepfakes as a means to drive tech platforms to take preventative action to address this abuse. This law should lead to obligations on tech platforms and payment providers to stop the promotion and facilitation of this deeply harmful form of violence against women - violence they currently profit from richly.”

However, Simon does also express some reservations about the new law, questioning whether it goes far enough and voicing concern about loopholes. “Unless the government amends the law so that the offence is based on the absence of consent rather than the perpetrator’s intent, there will be a massive loophole in the law,” she expressed. “Evidencing a perpetrator’s intent is not only incredibly difficult, but this loophole provides them with a ‘get out of jail free’ card for their defence, which will ultimately prevent victims from accessing justice. We’ve seen this happen with victims of image-based sexual abuse, and the government has finally acknowledged and fixed this problem by closing the loophole. So why are victims of deepfakes, which are increasing exponentially, being left to suffer the same outcome?”

The new law to criminalise the creation of deepfake sexually explicit images is part of the Criminal Justice Bill, which is currently going through parliament.

Creating sexually explicit deepfake images is set to become illegal