AI porn deepfakes are coming, here's how to stop them
For many parents, navigating their child's teenage years can be a challenge. This challenge is multiplied with the popularity and prevalence of social media.
It is one thing to equip your child with the ability to cope with wonders and difficulties of life in the real world - but now, in addition, our children are having to navigate the more treacherous waters of social media.
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland is reviewing the Online Safety Act to strengthen it, and the government has quadrupled funding to the eSafety Commissioner to help her keep our kids safe online.
But we know online bullying can follow a child home from school and can torment them into the night.
Porn is available in their pockets - with young kids seeing violent and degrading sex before they've even had their first kiss.
Research is coming to light about how social media can rewire our children's brains and lead to greater anxiety and depression.
And now there is a new threat - one that the Albanese Labor Government is taking very seriously.
Artificial intelligence is advancing in leaps and bounds - and with it, the capacity to create realistic looking deep fake material without a person's consent.
You feed a photo of a real person into the app, which then spits out an ultra-realistic nude picture or video of that person.
Funnily enough, some of the most popular apps don't work on male bodies. Just young girls and women.
Already young people - the majority of them girls - have been severely distressed and sometimes suicidal when their images have been manipulated by these apps and shared in group chats or online.
The government is acting. Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus has introduced legislation this week targeting use of generative AI to create non-consensual, sexually explicit deepfake material.
This legislation will create a new criminal offence of sharing, without consent, sexually explicit images that have been digitally created using AI or other forms of technology.
Our government is getting top of emerging technology, rather than waiting until the horse has bolted.
We are in a crucial hinge moment in history.
AI is a game changer for everything - from how we deliver medical care to how we complete menial administrative tasks.
It's crucial that we harness the power of this technology. But we also have to recognise and rein it in when it can do harm.
These laws are amongst the first of their kind in the world. And once passed, the new laws will make it illegal to share any non-consensual deepfake material online.
This will not only protect the people whose images have been manipulated without their consent - but will go some way to stamping out the culture of misogyny that exists in many corners of the internet.
The change aims to enable the law to catch up with technology - what my colleague Mark Dreyfus calls a “damaging and deeply distressing form of abuse.”
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