Madam Chair, members of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, thank you for inviting me to testify before you today.
While this study covers a wide range of topics, we're here to highlight a very specific dimension: the need to address the growing threat of deepfake pornography and its effects on women and girls in Canada.
Our presentation will touch on three key aspects of deepfakes—one, what they are; two, who is affected; and three, what can be done about them.
Deepfake technology, as you know, is generated AI that creates fake audiovisual content by manipulating a person's appearance and likeness. As the technology has advanced, AI-generated content has become increasingly sophisticated and harder to distinguish from real-life footage. Lifelike deepfakes can now be generated using just a single photo of a person. As a result, it's not just celebrities and public figures who are vulnerable. Everyone is vulnerable to this technology, and though there are other applications for deepfakes, by far the most common use is for non-consensual porn.
The vast majority of deepfakes are pornographic, and these overwhelmingly feature female subjects. It's important for the committee to know that this gendered and sexualized use of the technology is not new. The term deepfake actually originated in 2017 and stemmed from the practice of using online tools to switch female celebrities' faces onto pornographic videos. In other words non-consensual porn has been central to the technology since its very beginning.
While the unauthorized use and creation of fake intimate images is not a new phenomenon—Photoshop, for example, has been around for decades—the advent of generative AI technology has taken this issue to a whole new level. Today, highly realistic and convincing fake pornographic content can be produced quickly and with minimal effort and skills. Even when fake, these types of images inflict real emotional, societal and reputational harm on victims.
Now even children are affected. In the past year, reports have exploded of schoolgirls who have found themselves the subject of pornographic deepfakes made and shared by their own classmates.
All this goes to show that deepfake porn is not a trivial matter. It's real. It poses a significant threat to people and to human dignity, and as such, it demands our attention and action.