A woman who has been the victim of deepfake pornography is calling for a change in the law.
Last year, Helen Mort discovered that non-sexual images of her had been uploaded to a porn website.
Users of the site were invited to edit the photos, merging Helen’s face with explicit and violent sexual images.
Speaking to BBC Radio 5 Live’s Mobeen Azhar, Helen said she wanted to see the creation and distribution of these images made an offence.
“This is a crime which in many cases is going on invisibly,” Helen said. “Those images of me had been out there for years and I didn’t know about them, and I’m still having nightmares about some of them now. It’s an incredibly serious form of abuse.”
Deepfakes are realistic computer-generated images or video, based on a real person.
Helen, a poet and writer from Sheffield, was alerted to the deepfake images by an acquaintance.
The original images were taken from her social media and included holiday pictures and photos from her pregnancy.
She said although some of the images were clearly manipulated, there were a few more “chilling” examples that were a “lot more plausible’.
“You go through different phases with things like this,” she said. “There was one point where I was just trying to laugh about the almost ridiculous nature of some of it.
She alerted the police to the images but was told that no action could be taken.