Sam Rae (Hawke, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

The Criminal Code Amendment (Deepfake Sexual Material) Bill 2024 is sorely needed in our community. This bill seeks to address some of the most troubling and serious matters that are facing people all across our community and particularly impacting young people. Without canvassing the specifics, my community has been very, very seriously affected by some terrible cases around the production and distribution of artificial intelligence generated deepfake material of a sexual nature. This bill specifically provides a legal framework that recognises this risk to people in our community. Indeed, it creates an appropriate set of penalties for those who seek to attack others using this vile material.

There are provisions under existing legislation to protect children from this sort of vile behaviour, but, up until this point, legislation has not kept pace with the development of technology and the rise of AI as a tool by which to produce and distribute this very troubling material. Fundamentally, at its heart is the very unfortunate reality that troubled and unscrupulous people across the community are taking advantage of artificial intelligence and other tools of technology to dishonestly and now illegally produce material that is specifically designed to denigrate and humiliate other people across our community. While it can be used against any member of the community, it is most often used against girls and young women. I think that everybody in this House can agree that in this day and age we want to ensure that women in our community aren't adversely impacted by this very unreasonable and very cruel use of technology in order to misrepresent them and their actions—to use or take advantage of them in the pursuit of terrible and abusive behaviour. As I said, this is sometimes for the purposes of denigrating and humiliating, and sometimes is for much more insidious purposes.

The reality is that the bill will create a new criminal offence framework that will ban the sharing of this non-consensual deepfake pornography. For those who aren't aware, this is essentially the use of artificial intelligence and other technological tools to manipulate existing photographs, or perhaps to generate new photographs or material that appears to be photographs of real people by using source material. But those photographs themselves are entirely fake; they aren't real, and they generally depict the victim in some form of compromising position of a sexual nature—nudity or an inappropriate matter. Of course, the victims of this material have in no way given their consent for that to be the case.

Unfortunately, with the rise of that technology we've seen the prevalence of these crimes, of this type of denigrating behaviour increasing, and that is of immense concern to all people across the community. These reforms make exceptionally clear that people who are engaging in the production and dissemination of this sexually explicit material without consent will be subject to very serious criminal penalties, including, for those who are found guilty, a maximum penalty of six years imprisonment for transmitting this sexual material without consent, and seven years imprisonment for what I term the 'aggravated' offences associated with it, where the person created the material themselves.

It should be made clear that this legislation goes to dealing with material depicting adults. There already exists a framework and a set of laws under the Criminal Code which deal with child abuse material separately. It must be noted that the sanctions with regard to that material are very serious as well, but they aren't the focus of this particular bill.

This bill deals with matters where a person transmits this material across the community by using a carriage service—perhaps a phone or over the internet. It deals with material where the person depicted appears to be 18 years or older and with material where the person is depicted in a sexual manner or pose or engaging in sexual activity, or indeed where someone's sexual organs are used in the depiction. And of course it deals with matters where consent isn't provided. These are really troubling matters for our community to talk about, because these offences are so awful. Their impact on people, particularly on young people and particularly on women in our community, is extraordinarily profound. There is absolutely no legitimate purpose for engaging in the generation of this deepfake pornographic material that depicts a non-consenting person in our community. We will be working really closely with the state and territory governments to implement these laws and to ensure they are appropriately supported through policing as well as the education that necessarily goes with emerging technologies. This will ensure that our community can, first and foremost, have an understanding of the risks associated with this technology and also the penalties that come against any individual or any group of people that engage in behaviour that is in contravention of this bill.

Just to be clear on a number of matters, the offences covered by this bill do not cover private communications between consenting adults. I think it's worth making that clear so that people across the broader community can understand that this is not a bill designed to impede upon the activities of consenting adults who are engaging in private matters. The government has no wish or interest to intervene in such activities or behaviour. It is not designed to curb what is essentially legal behaviour between consenting adults. This is specifically aimed at dealing with, as I said, the production and dissemination of material that depicts non-consenting adults.

As I said earlier, my community has specifically dealt with this challenge in a very confronting manner. There are very strong views across our community about how the government should be responding, how governments of all persuasions at all levels should be responding, to this emerging risk. I am very pleased to see our government, the Albanese Labor government, bring forward, in an efficient but considered manner, a bill that seeks to address this emerging threat to our community and create a legislative framework that will appropriately address it to protect our kids, protect women and, indeed, protect all of our community against this awful and insidious behaviour.

Kate Chaney (Curtin, Independent) | Link to this | Hansard source

The Status of Women Report Card released in March this year contains some sobering statistics, including that 57 per cent of women who recently experienced sexual harassment experienced it electronically, such as online or on a phone. The Criminal Code Amendment (Deepfake Sexual Material) Bill 2024 is an important bill. These amendments meet a need to strengthen existing offences which deal with the unlawful use of private sexual material. The amendments create offences that prohibit both the creation of and the non-consensual sharing of sexually explicit material depicting adults online. Children are dealt with under separate legislation. The bill goes further and also creates an offence in relation to images that have been created or altered with technology, including AI—in other words, what we refer to as 'deepfakes'. It's currently not illegal to create a fake AI generated pornographic image.

Obviously, as technology advances at a rapid pace, it becomes easier and quicker to generate sexually explicit material and images. The technology is so sophisticated, it's become difficult to detect whether an image is real or not, and there are several issues here. AI enables an image to be manipulated so people can be depicted in a highly convincing way, physically misrepresenting them, making it look like they're doing something that they have not done. Critically, whether the images are real or false, the key issue is consent, or lack of it, and the devastating impact this could have on the person depicted, on their personal and professional lives. The purpose of creating those images is almost always to deliberately cause harm—to intimidate, shame, bully and frighten people.

I'm very supportive of these amendments. This bill is the criminal justice response to the unlawful use of non-consensual sexual images. But it's only one part of a wider reform agenda in relation to online safety. And this reform agenda for online safety is only one part of the national approach required to address the worrying issue of intimidation and violence, particularly against women and children.

In the context of this bill, we should be very concerned about the broader and long-term cultural and social impact of image based abuse in our communities and particularly on women. The sharing of intimate images without consent, whether they're deepfake or otherwise, largely reflects a concerning culture of harassment and misogyny. AI and technology are allowing perpetrators to amplify that culture further, with devastating reach.

While this bill rightly focuses on the unlawful use of private sexual material, victims of deepfakes can also experience an intense sense of violation even when the deepfakes are not sexual in nature. Having your identity co-opted and being made to appear to say or do things that you would never say or do can undermine your sense of self and change how others see you.

I've already discussed the pressing need to address deepfakes to preserve our democracy. Effective use of deepfakes by bad actors can create confusion and mistrust that will make it difficult for our democratic and economic institutions to function. Deepfakes present huge risks in relation to the spread of misinformation both in elections and, importantly, in scams.

There's a significant asymmetry between the ease and cost with which misleading AI generated content can be created and disseminated, and the time and expense of having it removed, including when it's of a sexual nature but also, especially, when the content is not of a sexual nature. This is a huge issue, wider than the scope of this bill, and I urge the government to address it urgently. We need to find creative ways to address this imbalance between the ease of creation and the cost of removal.

Fundamentally we require a massive cultural change that has many parts to it. Legislation plays an important role in defining acceptable norms, but cultural change will only happen if it's also addressed at an educational level with young people. I welcomed the announcement on 17 June of a new phase of the Stop it at the Start campaign, which aims to give tools to parents and caregivers to challenge the echo chamber of disrespect that children are often immersed in online and to help young people navigate harmful content. The online normalisation of harmful stereotypes and behaviours against girls and women is having a particularly alarming impact on adolescent boys. To achieve cultural change we must address this on the actual platforms, apps and devices where that material is readily available and where the algorithms are targeting young men, and at an early age. I note the current Statutory Review of the Online Safety Act 2021, which is considering, among other things, a minimum age for access to social media and the prevention of online harms, including online and technology facilitated abuse.

My electorate of Curtin has provided the minister with a community submission, following the completion of an online safety survey by 600 constituents, testing their support for stronger regulation. Seventy-five per cent of respondents want the Online Safety Act to regulate technology facilitated abuse, and 86 per cent want the act to address emerging technology risks, including placing responsibility and expectations on platforms to protect users. This is a recurring theme and challenge. How can service providers effectively detect and remove offensive content, and, specifically in the context of this bill, deepfake content, and how do we effectively require them to do so?

We have some measures in place. The basic online safety expectations, the BOSE, are determined under the Online Safety Act and provide a framework of expectations to service providers of social media, mobile phone and other messaging services, and apps. Those providers are expected to ensure we can use their platforms and online services safely, with a minimisation of unlawful and harmful material and activity. The government amended the BOSE in May this year to include an expectation of providers to proactively minimise 'the extent to which online services are used to produce or facilitate unlawful or harmful material, including deepfake non-consensual intimate images'. This is a good start, but testing and policing this is a challenge. Serving a notice on providers that requires them to explain how they're doing this is not enough. The BOSE fall short of requiring platforms and service providers to develop ways of independently detecting harmful content and deepfake images.

I look forward to the report of the Statutory Review of the Online Safety Act, as well as the findings of the joint select committee on the impact of social media in Australia. I'll be advocating sharper instruments and stronger solutions.

In conclusion, this bill is a very welcome criminal justice response to the unlawful dissemination of non-consensual images, and I support these amendments. The distribution of deepfake AI generated images is one part of a disturbing challenge we face in Australia to address harm, particularly against women and children. Cultural change will require many things, but, most certainly, we need to embed early, targeted education. We need to look for creative solutions to minimise harm. We also need to require service providers to detect and remove harmful material, including deepfake images. I commend this bill to the House.

Kate Thwaites (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

The Criminal Code Amendment (Deepfake Sexual Material) Bill 2024 is an important bill. It will create new criminal offences to ban the sharing of non-consensual deepfake pornography, acting on this kind of digitally created and altered sexually explicit material that is a damaging form of abuse against women and girls and that we know can inflict and, in fact, is inflicting deep harm on victims. Sexually explicit deepfakes created and shared without consent are being used to degrade and dehumanise women and to target women. Of course, in many cases, they are also perpetuating harmful gender stereotypes and contributing to gender based violence. When these deepfakes are shared with others or posted online without the consent of the person depicted, this is, of course, a serious breach of a person's privacy and it has long-lasting harmful impacts on those victims, who never consented to having their image shared.

Our government is really aware of the growing issue of deepfake technology, and we are responding to this issue, particularly through this bill, where it is being used to create false and damaging depictions of real people engaging in sexually explicit acts. These reforms will make clear that those who share sexually explicitly material without consent using technology like AI will be subject to serious criminal penalties, as it should be. The new offences will have a maximum penalty of six years imprisonment for transmitting sexual material without consent and seven years imprisonment for aggravated offences, including where the person created the material. The offences will only apply to sexual material depicting adults, while child abuse material, including AI generated material, will continue to be dealt with under dedicated separate offences in the Criminal Code.

These reforms are a high priority for our government, and they do follow the public commitment we made on 1 May this year to introduce a suite of measures to tackle online harms, particularly those targeting women and girls. I do know that this is an issue that is important to my community. Like so many around Australia, they are concerned by the trend they see of harmful, misogynistic material being shared online and, of course, the devastating consequences that that has for too many women and girls in my community and, again, right around the country. So this bill is one part of a number of measures our government is taking to tackle misogyny online and to make online spaces safer for women and girls. These reforms and others coming through the parliament—other mechanisms as well—are making women and girls safer online.

These changes ensure that the offences apply to both real material, such as unaltered images and recordings, and fake or doctored material that has been created or altered using technology such as deepfakes, so it's bringing those two together. As I said, it does build on other actions being taken by our government, including increasing funding for the eSafety Commissioner, advancing the review of the Online Safety Act a year ahead of schedule, our commitment to address harmful practices such as doxxing and the work we are doing to overhaul the Privacy Act, to give all Australians, particularly women who are experiencing domestic and family violence, greater control over their own personal information.

Here in Australia and across the world, we have seen the rapid growth in deepfakes and sexually explicit deepfakes in recent years. There are some estimates that suggest that 96 per cent of deepfakes online are pornographic in nature. That is an absolutely shocking statistic. ThePalgrave Handbook of Gendered Violence and Technology tells us that, in 2017, the first documented instance of amateur deepfakes appeared, with a Reddit user sharing several images of celebrities' faces manipulated by AI onto the bodies of pornography actors. Only two years later an app using AI tech was released allowing pretty much anyone to create convincing deepfakes of any female, followed by an AI bot becoming available on the Telegram app and making use of that technology in early 2020. In a mere matter of months after this, a review found that almost 105,000 manufactured images of different women had been created and shared using this technology.

In the four years or so since then, the technology has gone even further. It is now at the point, as law enforcement here in Australia have reflected, that, in a six-month period in the last year or so, their experts in identifying deepfake material have gone from being able to identify real or manufactured material to being unable to tell the difference. We have a genuine problem here. We have people, particularly women and girls, being harmed by material that is deeply offensive being created and shared online without their consent.

We do know artificial intelligence is rapidly developing, and I don't want to say that is all a bad thing. There are some positive contributions artificial intelligence can make. But in the context of this bill there are certainly some very harmful contributions that it is currently making, and it is particularly concerning if advances in AI technology deepen existing misogyny in our society, if those technologies are actually used to embed further the inequalities and dangers that exist for women already in our society. Again, that is why laws such as these are so important.

As I said before, this type of attack can happen to anyone. It isn't just celebrities. We have seen celebrities like Taylor Swift being subject to deepfake material that is sexually explicit but, while those have been the high-profile victims, many women here in Australia and around the world have had the same thing happen to them. Our government wants to ensure the people who are creating and sharing these kinds of deepfakes are held accountable and are punished for their actions. There has been existing work on this as well. The eSafety Commissioner has been trying to fill the gap on image based abuse. With several test cases now under their belt, they report a 90 per cent success rate on take-downs. We need of course a multisystem approach here, both penalties and regulations that apply to service providers, to technology platforms and to the generative AI tool companies and that education and social norm piece about the creation of this material as well.

This bill goes to the legislative side and strengthening the legislation framework to deal with this issue. It also builds on work being done in some of our states, where there are specific offences involving image based abuse. Victoria and South Australia have introduced summary offences involving the non-consensual sharing of intimate images in response to the issue of deepfake porn. In my home state of Victoria, the Justice Legislation Amendment (Sexual Offences and Other Matters) Act 2022 made a range of changes, including updating Victoria's definition of consent, criminalising stealthing and introducing new offences involving intimate images that can be used to prosecute users of deepfake pornography.

It is a difficult area of law, but that is certainly no excuse for our not acting. Again, those difficulties have been taken into account as our government has moved forward with this bill and with these changes. We know that deepfake creators may be liable for defamation under Australian law, but the current legal landscape means defamation recourse was designed mainly for the written or spoken word. This bill aims to address the gap we have in existing laws and to meet technology where it is. It will be important in addressing an issue that, if we allow it to continue in the manner in which it has, will continue to do too much harm to too many women across our country.

This bill was developed in consultation with the Australian Federal Police, the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions and other Commonwealth agencies. I want to highlight that it responds to calls from victims-survivors, and I thank all of those victims-survivors who have done the work with us on this. It responds to calls from community groups and from other members of the public who've contacted me—and, I know, other members in this place—asking us to do more to address the non-consensual distribution of sexually explicit deepfake material. We are clear that without taking action this situation only gets worse. As the Australian Federal Police commissioner said earlier this year at the National Press Club: 'It is likely that we have a tsunami of AI generated abuse material coming at us. We've got to get ahead of that tsunami.' This action will be an important part of getting that work done and getting appropriate laws in place.

The laws are supported by experts in the space—including Dr Asher Flynn, who has publicly written about the laws in Lawyers Weekly. She's the chief investigator and deputy lead at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence and an associate professor of criminology at Monash University. She says the laws:

… will address a major legal gap in Australia, in which the creation of sexualised deepfakes was not illegal anywhere in Australia, except in the state of Victoria. The new laws will see Australia once again leading the way in legal responses to online sexual harm.

The laws may also go some way towards curbing the accessibility of sexualised deepfake technologies.

It is good to have that endorsement from a leader in the field.

It's also important to reflect on that final point there, about curbing the accessibility of sexualised deepfake technologies, and also to reflect on curbing the types of societal norms we are creating, where people think it is okay to create these types of images. It is not okay. It should not be seen as just a normal part of interacting in the world or of interacting with women or of dating women—that you create this type of material. There is a legal response we are putting in place, but I very much hope that, alongside that, there is a norm setting response, where we are very clearly saying that this has no place in Australian society, at both a government level and a community level that we are firmly against this type of behaviour.

The bill amends the Criminal Code to modernise and strengthen offences for the nonconsensual sharing of simulated and real sexual material online. The existing Criminal Code has criminalised nonconsensual sharing of private sexual material since 2018, but those existing offences did not clearly apply to material that has been created or altered using technology. Those offences will be repealed by the amendments and our new offences will apply to nonconsensual sharing of both real material, such as unaltered images and recordings, and fake or doctored material that's been created or altered using technology such as deepfakes. The offences do not cover private communications between consenting adults or interfere with private sexual relationships involving adults. It is a complex area but it is an area that demands action through this legislation and through the multiple pieces of other work our government is doing to keep Australians safe from technology facilitated abuse. This bill bans the sharing of nonconsensual deepfake pornography, taking action on digitally created and altered sexually explicit material that we know is a damaging form of abuse against women and girls—this kind of material that is too often used to degrade and dehumanise others, that targets women and, as I spoke about earlier, that perpetuates harmful gender stereotypes and is part of driving gender based violence.

This is an important bill. It is one of a number of measures our government is doing to try and make online spaces safer, particularly for women and girls. It will hold perpetrators to account for causing harm through the nonconsensual sharing of deepfakes, and it does the work to ensure Australia's criminal offences are keeping pace with new technology. I commend the bill to the House.

Zali Steggall (Warringah, Independent) | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to strongly support this bill, the Criminal Code Amendment (Deepfake Sexual Material) Bill 2024, but I also say we need to go further in addressing deepfakes. Whilst this bill addresses deepfakes in a very specific context, when it comes to nonconsensual sexual material—and that is horrendous, and I welcome that it will soon be a crime—we need to address the broader question of deepfakes and the use of AI. This is especially so when it comes to advertising, where, for example, a consumer is misled into thinking an image or something presented to them is real when in fact it is AI generated—in fact all forms of non-consensual use of deepfake material using a person's name, image and likeness. I'll come to that later.

In that respect I move:

That all words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"the House:

(1) notes that:

(a) deepfakes present inherent risks including the spread of misinformation, threats to privacy and security, altering election outcomes and misleading and deceiving voters;

(b) Australians have lost over $8 million to scams linked to online investment trading platforms, often using deepfakes;

(c) the Australian Electoral Commissioner has warned that Australia is not ready for its first artificial intelligence election that is coming within the next 12 months;

(d) deepfakes of Australian politicians have already been used; and

(e) the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment (Voter Protections in Political Advertising) Bill 2023, introduced by the member for Warringah on 13 November 2023, bans the use of deepfakes in political advertising; and

(2) calls on the Government to take immediate action to extensively ban the creation and transmission of deepfakes without consent of the subject, to address the risks deepfakes present.

In relation to sexual material caught by this bill, we absolutely need to send a strong and unambiguous message that distributing deepfakes of non-consensual sexual material is horrendous and will be a crime. A person's identity is their own and must be protected. Non-consensual sharing of sexual material is a disturbing and damaging form of abuse. Victims face humiliation and mental distress, and it affects their reputation and relationships. They experience intense emotional distress, including anxiety, depression and a profound sense of violation. The psychological and social effects of deepfake pornography are severe, and they can impact on the smallest person, from students—maybe someone who is unsuspecting and fairly anonymous—to someone like Taylor Swift, who we know recently had an incident where deepfakes were made in relation to her image and likeness. We know that they can spread rapidly online, making it nearly impossible for victims to remove the content. This persistent digital footprint can have long-lasting repercussions on their personal and professional lives, impacting their relationships, career prospects and mental health. This bill is crucial for safeguarding the dignity, privacy and safety of all Australians, particularly women and girls.

While I welcome the bill, the government is well behind other jurisdictions when it comes to grappling with the broader issues that deepfakes present. As we enter this era of AI technology, deepfake pornography has become an increasingly prevalent issue. Manipulation of images or videos has been an issue for some time, but advances in technology over recent years have made it far easier to produce this sort of fake content. It's so realistic that it's indistinguishable to the naked eye. What once required significant time, skill and resources can now be done instantaneously, with minimal effort or skill required. Advances in AI have taken this even further, allowing rapid generation of content that is extremely realistic and incredibly difficult to identify as being fake. This form of online abuse involves using artificial images to create fake videos or images that depict individuals in sexually explicit scenarios without their consent. And the statistics are quite shocking: 96 per cent of all deepfake videos online are pornographic; 99 per cent of deepfake pornography targets women; and there was a 2,000 per cent rise in 2023 in the number of websites generating non-consensual sexual material using AI—a 2,000 per cent rise!

We need to go further: not only should deepfakes of this nature be banned but we need to think about where deepfakes are using and usurping another person's name, identity or likeness without their consent. That's why this amendment is important—for the government to be on notice that it must do more to look at the broader picture of deepfakes, across all the different ways in which they're used.

Let's consider the broader impact in relation to this bill. A 2024 Australian study found that more than 52 per cent of boys and 32 per cent of girls had reported viewing pornography by the age of 14. For most parents, that's quite shocking, because it's now of a completely different nature. This isn't about the magazines and things from previous eras; it's of a wholly different nature, and incredibly more confronting. This statistic is alarming because of its implications for young people's perceptions of sex, consent and relationships—what forms a healthy, respectful relationship. Exposure to pornography at a young age, particularly material generated by AI—and, certainly, non-consensual use of images—can distort understanding of healthy and respectful relationships. Further, our current crisis of intimate partner violence, particularly against women, demands strong and immediate preventive action against harmful ways that distort young people's understanding of consent and how to treat their partners respectfully. This bill sends a clear message that technology should not be used as a tool for abuse. With this bill, the Criminal Code is being amended to make it an offence to use a carriage service for non-consensual sexual material.

Governments are failing when it comes to preventing children from having access to AI generated pornography websites. Websites are legal in Australia, with nothing being done to prevent access by children. That is another area that must be addressed. As reported this weekend in the Sydney Morning Herald, more than 100,000 people used the Undress AI website every day. According to the article, users upload a photo and choose from picture settings like 'nude', 'BDSM' or 'sex' and from age options including 'subtract five'—even that concept is quite revolting—which uses AI to make the subject look five years younger. This is a supply chain issue. It's not just the users; it's the application companies, the app stores that allow these apps on their platforms, the search engines and even the credit card companies that facilitate payment and use of these tools.

There are also broader considerations. I know that this bill is framed in the context of the distribution of sexual content without consent and does not directly regulate all deepfakes created using the identity of people without their consent, but the bill before us does not define 'deepfake', nor does it address the many other risks that deepfakes pose, beyond sexual consent. That is why the amendment I've moved is important and why it should be addressed.

The government states that there are a number of workstreams on foot to tackle deepfakes in other parts of government, under the industry department, and further electoral reform, but greater action and ambition are needed. As a former professional athlete, I know from experience that the one thing you have to attract sponsors and earn a living as an athlete is the sale of your name, image and likeness, and these are clauses you have in your contracts. But what we now see with deepfakes is that that can be usurped, taken over without consent, to great detriment. It's important that we recognise that a person owns their own IP and their consent is required for it to be used or manipulated. That contractual right needs to be recognised, pulled into legislation and applied to all deepfakes created using a person's name, image, likeness or voice without their consent. No deepfakes should be permitted to the extent that they infringe on an individual's right to their own identity.

We are living in an advanced technological and digital age. It has seen immense and very fast progress but also new challenges that demand our attention and that we, as lawmakers, should be addressing. AI is moving faster than any regulator can keep up with, but that's not an excuse. Government needs to get on the front foot. Other countries, including the United States, the European Union, China and the United Kingdom, are acting faster than Australia in combating and regulating against the use of non-consensual deepfakes. Just this month Republican and Democrat senators have co-sponsored a bill to require social media companies to take down deepfakes within two days of them being reported. The European Union has passed the world's first comprehensive AI law, including a requirement for deepfakes to contain a watermark to inform users that they are fake images. Put yourself in the seat of a consumer that sees advertising: it might look unrealistic, but without a watermark, for example, as legislated by the European Union, how would a person know what is real and what is fake? I very much urge the government to consider the European Union legislation on the use of watermarks to inform viewers that what they are looking at is an AI generated deepfake, not a real image.

The stakes are high, and the road map for implementing further steps needs to be considered by the government. There are always implications with technological advancements. Sometimes they are for good and sometimes they are deeply concerning. It's imperative that we recognise the inherent risks of deepfakes, including the spread of misinformation—again, talking about consumers not being aware that they are deepfakes; threats to privacy and security; the altering of election outcomes; and the misleading and deceiving of voters. I've been a long-term advocate for protecting voters from misinformation and disinformation, and I've introduced a private member's bill, the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment (Voter Protections in Political Advertising) Bill 2023, which bans the use of deepfakes in political advertising.

The integrity of our electoral process and campaigning is also threatened, alongside the outcomes of Australians' democratic right to choose government and elect their representative. The Australian Electoral Commission has said it doesn't have the tools to detect or deter AI generated misinformation at the upcoming federal election and that Australia is not ready for its first AI election. That is concerning, yet we still haven't seen action from the government, despite a commitment to do so, to either debate the voter protections bill that I have tabled or introduce its own legislation to ensure there is no misinformation or deceptive and misleading political advertising.

We have seen huge amounts of misinformation and disinformation. Often it is identifiable as being misinformation and disinformation but at least from a source that doesn't look like people you trust. It is used not only for elections. We are seeing huge losses for individuals and corporations as a result of scams. Scams often use deepfakes. Only a few years ago, the biggest scams a company faced were false invoices; now it is deepfakes. British engineering firm Arup lost $25 million earlier this year when a deepfake video of company executives was used to convince an employee to transfer money after they took a video call, as others seen in the call sounded and looked like colleagues he recognised.

In March this year, the ACCC reported that last year Australians lost some $800 million to online investment trading platform trading scams, and, only last week, the Channel 7's YouTube channel was packed and branded with fake Tesla content to promote a cryptocurrency scheme. The National Anti-Scam Centre is warning consumers that they need to be much more aware of fake news articles and deepfake videos of public figures that endorse and link to online investment trading platform scams, particularly on social media, especially the ones using Hollywood actors, high-profile people. They are using deepfakes of these people to then try and scam people, especially when it comes to financial scams.

In Australia, deepfakes of politicians, including senior federal government ministers, are being used to promote these fake financial schemes as well. So I welcome the work being done by the government, including their interim response to the safe and responsible AI consultation, and the establishment of the artificial intelligence experts group. I also acknowledge the work done by the Australian Human Rights Commission on adopting AI in Australia, which calls on the government to adopt watermarking as a priority.

It must also be highlighted the risks that AI presents to embedding past biases, inequalities, including gender and race, in up to 44 per cent of AI models. It is embedded in those AI models this idea of the norm generally being a white Caucasian male. For example, doctors are always considered men, nurses are always described as women, and poor people as people of colour. That is what happens in those AI models. It is an issue that has been highlighted not only by the Australian Human Rights Commissioner but the United Nations and other jurisdictions.

I fully support an extensive ban on deepfakes without consent and I fully support this bill as a first step in creating a safer online environment for all Australians, particularly women. We need further, faster action from the government on a number of fronts with AI, so I urge them to act.

Let us not forget the need for education and awareness. We need to make sure young people are aware of the danger and legal ramifications of creating and sharing deepfake content that will come as a result of this legislation and that implementation of this bill is accompanied by robust supports for victims, offering psychological, legal and social assistance. I commend the bill to the House but I also urge the government take note of the amendment moved.

Ian Goodenough (Moore, Liberal Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the amendment seconded?

Kylea Tink (North Sydney, Independent) | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes, and I reserve my right to speak.

Brian Mitchell (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Criminal Code Amendment (Deepfake Sexual Material) Bill 2024. The growing issue of AI deepfake technology being used to create false depictions of real people is causing stress and anxiety across the country. But I guess the most important thing is to identify exactly what we are talking about when it comes to a deepfake. Deepfakes are images, videos or sound files—often generated using artificial intelligence—of a real person that have been edited to create a realistic but false depiction of that person doing or saying something they did not actually do or say. Deepfakes can create entirely new content or manipulate existing content using a large number of photos or recordings of a person. The risks of abuse are growing as the tools to create deepfakes become incredibly accessible.

Celebrities and politicians globally have been victims of fake images and videos for many years—some of it has been for comedic purposes but a lot of it is more sinister. We've heard from previous speakers about the prevalence of sexually explicit deepfakes running to 90 per cent or so. Disturbingly, as the rate of technology in AI gathers so quickly, those tools are now readily available. You can just download the app from the app store, and you can be making deepfakes. They are readily available for anyone to make a fake, simply by uploading profile pictures of someone from a social media account. The more photos that you have of a real person, the more realistic that deepfake can become because the technology can read that image so much more.

It's important to note that the legislation before the House today deals explicitly with adults, not children. But it is young people in particular, of course, who are using social media, and they are—I hate to say it—naturals at using new technology. It comes very easily to them to use this sort of technology, and young people in particular are becoming both perpetrator and victim. Far too often, girls are being targeted and, worryingly, by boys they know.

In the past month alone, we've seen reports of a very well-known school north-west of Melbourne whose students were targeted with fake nude images circulating online. The principal said that about 50 girls from the school had been targeted. He said that it appeared the images of their faces were taken from social media sites—innocently placed photos on a social media site, maybe in a sports team or celebrating something with their family—before those photos were downloaded and then manipulated to make what this principal described as 'obscene photographs'. In May, a boy was expelled from another college in Melbourne's south-east after creating fake sexual images of a female teacher which were circulated around the school.

Digitally created and altered sexually explicit material is a very damaging form of abuse against women and girls, in particular, that can inflict deep and lasting harm. I have a message to any young men out there. As I said, this legislation targets adults and the depiction of adults, not children, but it doesn't take long for a 16-year-old boy to become a 17-year-old and then an 18-year-old adult. I have a message to the young men of this country. It's not funny. It's not a lark. It's not youthful, innocent high jinks on the way to adulthood. It's abuse. It's disrespectful. And now it's a crime.

Deepfakes are emotionally harmful and can be and are being used in blackmail sextortion scams. Last September, the social media analytics firm Graphika recorded a 2,000 per cent increase in the number of website links offering deepfake tools. It's a popular technology. I can understand the allure of it—to download photos of somebody you know and make a deepfake. People who enjoy tech enjoy this sort of thing. As I said, some of it has been innocent. I think there has been a popular one on TikTok, or something like that, of a guy pretending to be Tom Cruise. He just spends all of his time running through the videos like Tom Cruise runs. It's clearly a deepfake; it's clearly not Tom Cruise. We're not fooled into thinking that Tom Cruise is running around the streets. But that's a very different proposition to what is before the House today, which is about the sexual deepfakes causing harm to people.

Index of Biodiversity Surveys for Assessments data from across the UK, New Zealand and Australia in 2021 revealed some disturbing facts. Thirteen per cent of respondents in Australia aged between 16 and 84 have been victims in one or more ways, including through distribution or the threat of distribution. There are twice as many LGBTIQ victims as there are straight victims. Indigenous people or people from minority ethnic groups are more likely to be victims, and people with disabilities are 3½ times more likely to be victims.

The Albanese government is creating new criminal offences to ban the non-consensual sharing of deepfake pornography, and this legislation comes not before time. It's a difficult area. The fact is this technology is moving very, very quickly, and it's difficult for parliaments to keep up. But we're having a red-hot crack at this. It's so important. These reforms will make clear that those who share sexually explicit material without consent using technology like artificial intelligence will be subject to serious criminal penalties. Let me repeat that: it's not just the people who create this stuff who are in the firing line; it's also the people who share it. If you see it and you think, 'Oh, I'll send that on to a mate,' or 'I'll put it on my site or send it to somebody,' as soon as you hit 'send', you are committing a criminal offence and you are liable for time in prison.

The new offences carry a maximum penalty of six years imprisonment for transmitting sexual material without consent and seven years imprisonment for aggravated offences, including where the person created the material. If you're a 20-year-old bloke sitting around making this stuff thinking it's funny and you share it your mates, then you're up for 13 years, and your mates who share it are up for six years. That's how important this is. That's how serious it is. This is criminal behaviour.

These amendments are high-priority reforms following the Albanese government's public commitment on 1 May this year to introduce a suite of measures to tackle online harms, particularly those targeting women and young girls. This bill will amend the Criminal Code 1995 to modernise and strengthen offences targeting the non-consensual sharing of sexually explicit material online. It includes material that's been created or altered using technology such as deepfakes. Aggravated offences will build on this new underlying offence where the person was responsible for the creation or alteration of the sexual material transmitted. Sexually explicit deepfakes created and shared without consent are used to degrade and dehumanise others, target women, perpetuate harmful gender stereotypes and drive gender based violence. When shared or posted online without the consent of the person depicted, it is a serious breach of a person's privacy and can have long-lasting harmful impacts on victims, and it will become a criminal offence once it passes the House and the parliament. The Criminal Code currently criminalises the sharing of private sexual material online, but the definition of 'private sexual material' is potentially limiting. That's how fast technology is moving. It doesn't explicitly extend to artificially generated material such as deepfakes. That's why this bill removes any argument.

The bill proposes to repeal the existing offence relating to private sexual material and replace it with a new offence that applies where a person transmits material using a carriage service, the material depicts a person who is or appears to be 18 years of age or older, the material depicts or appears to depict certain poses or body parts of a sexual nature and the person knows the person depicted does not consent to the transmission of the material or is reckless as to whether the depicted person consents. It's important to note that it's not just private people who are covered by this; it also covers well-known celebrities, such as the one who has been noted here tonight who has been a victim to some of this. If someone shares that image, thinking, 'Look at this; this is funny,' even if they know it's only pretending to be so and so but they still send it, they've got no reasonable basis to say that the person has consented to them sending it and they've still committed a criminal act. People need to understand how serious this is. If someone is sharing images or videos, deepfakes, of celebrities, politicians or people in the public eye, that's also captured in this legislation; it's not just for private citizens.

The bill also introduces two aggravated offences which apply increased penalties to the offence. This is where, before the commission of the underlying offence, three or more civil penalty orders are made against the person for contraventions of relevant provisions of the Online Safety Act 2021 and the person is responsible for the creation or alteration of the sexual material transmitted. These amendments are essential to ensure that offences can apply to both 'real' material, such as unaltered images and recordings, and fake or doctored material that has been created or altered by using technology, such as deepfakes. The new offences will not cover private communications between consenting adults or interfere with private adult relationships. The government has no business being in consenting adults' bedrooms. What people want to do as consulting adults is up to them. As long as there's consent, that's fine, but of course it's up to the people in that relationship to make sure that there absolutely is consent and not coercion.

The bill sets out specific defences to the transmission of sexual material without consent to ensure that the offence is targeted and proportionate and does not overly criminalise the sharing of adult pornography for legitimate purposes. The new offences will apply only to material depicting, or appearing to depict, adults. The reason for this is that the Criminal Code already criminalises the use of carriage services for child abuse material, including child abuse material generated by artificial intelligence.

These false altered images and videos cause irreversible emotional, financial and reputational harm. They're a real invasion of somebody's sense of self. Unfortunately, it is women who are vastly and disproportionately impacted by this. Our government wants to make it clear to the creators and sharers of these images that making and sharing this material is immoral and often misogynistic and that if it is done without consent it is always a crime. I commend this bill to the House.

Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal National Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

It's my privilege to rise to speak on the Criminal Code Amendment (Deepfake Sexual Material) Bill 2024. I've been working in this field to try to protect children online ever since about 2016, I think it was. I hadn't been in this building long when a young girl took her life. Her name was Dolly Everett. The bullying that she had been exposed to over a course of months or years really hit a nerve with me, and I thought, 'There's got to be a better way.' So I had a meeting with the DIGI down in Sydney. The Digital Industry Group is a lobby group made up of the tech platforms—Google, Apple, Meta and all of the usual suspects, the social media platforms, that you would expect. I asked them what they were doing to protect young people online, to ensure that we didn't see a repeat of Dolly Everett's very sad death.

I walked away from that meeting thinking that I had just taken part in a meeting with big tobacco. There was no problem. Everything was good. Social media platforms and tech companies were a force for good. There was no problem to see. It was almost like being told that smoking was good for me. I went away from that meeting feeling angry and upset that really no lessons were being learnt. Fast forward eight years, and I found myself on the social media committee, which is sitting at the moment, holding hearings. Last Friday, the committee had before us Meta executives. We had Snapchat and TikTok. They have learnt nothing over the last eight years. You will have heard the chief of worldwide safety for Meta say in that public hearing, in response to a number of questions that I asked her, that she did not acknowledge that social media was causing harm to our young people. That, of course, has been treated with the disdain that it deserves.

A lot of people have spoken out. A lot of families have spoken out about the harm that is being caused by social media and social platforms. I read out a history or a submission from a mother, Emma Mason, who talked about her daughter, Tilly Rosewarne, who was just 15 when she took her own life. Tilly was just 15 years old. She'd been subjected to horrendous bullying at school. She'd made 11 previous attempts on her life as a result of that horrendous bullying. A part of that bullying process was the posting on Snapchat of a photo of a nude girl with Tilly's head superimposed on top of it. That was the straw that broke the camel's back for Tilly. Emma Mason provided that submission to the committee about the agony and the pain that that family went through when Tilly took her own life.

That evil is happening in every school, in every town and in every city in this country, where young people are being subjected to the most horrendous bullying, where young people are being subjected to revenge porn and where young people are being subjected to a degree of fraud and coercion to part with money to try and make this all go away. These things are now being done by criminal syndicates that are preying on young people, asking them to take comprising photographs of themselves and then threatening that, if those young people don't pay a sum of money, the criminals will distribute those photographs to their parents and everybody on their contact list. A couple of weeks ago, I had Emma Mason and a number of parents come and see me in my parliamentary office. Each had a story of how they had lost a child to the sort of stuff this bill seeks to remedy.

This bill serves a good purpose. But I am a little concerned—I don't want to make this a political speech, because this is too important for politics—as to the motivation for this bill. I don't understand why, effectively, the regime currently in place, with what is happening now, is not good enough or how what is being proposed by this bill will in some way improve what we've already got. I think what parents and in fact the person that is the victim in all of this want the most is not so much a criminal trial; they want these images taken down, and they want them taken down yesterday. Under current laws put in place by the coalition, the eSafety Commissioner already has the power to direct those images to be taken down, so I'm at a bit of a loss as to understand how what is being proposed is going to be an improvement on what is currently the law of the land today.

We can't have this debate and discussion about these issues unless we look at broader issues such as the impact of online pornography on young people. In 2020 I led an inquiry as the chair of the Social Policy and Legal Affairs Committee, which ultimately recommended age verification to prevent young people from accessing porn online. This is an eminently sensible concept. We know without a shadow of a doubt that there is a direct correlation between the viewing of hardcore pornography online by young people and domestic violence. The committee I was on heard story after story of the lives of young men and women being impacted by the viewing of hardcore, violent, misogynistic pornography. This is not the pornography of Playboy and Penthouse of yesteryear; this is hardcore, violent pornography, degrading of women, and young people are accessing this porn without any impediment.

All they've got to do is go onto a porn website and tick a box saying they're over 18. That is not good enough. If the people in this House believe young people should be protected, if the members of this House believe the online world should replicate the real world, you can't access porn in the real world until you turn 18, yet online all you've got to do is tick a box saying, 'I'm over 18.' That is not good enough. That's why we recommended that we introduce age verification for both online pornography and online gambling. I wouldn't have thought this was a terribly controversial view, and yet we still don't have it. This recommendation was made in 2000. In November last year the shadow communications minister stood at the dispatch box and introduced a private member's bill to introduce age verification for online photography, for online gambling and for social media. What did those members opposite in the government do? They refused to support it. They refused to support the protection of our kids by introducing age verification. That saddens me immensely.

Then, about a month ago, the Prime Minister had this 'come to Jesus' moment, this 'road to Damascus' moment, where he stood up in question time and said: 'Hey, guess what? We're going to introduce age verification for social media. We'll make it 16.' That is exactly what we tried to do seven months ago, and we were blocked. Why? Why are we putting the lives of our kids, the wellbeing of our kids, at risk? The communications minister said: 'We don't want to introduce age verification for online pornography. We want to let the porn companies, big porn, police themselves with a self-regulating code of conduct.' That's like putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank. Only because parents around this country, supported by News Corp newspapers, started a campaign to introduce age verification for social media and online porn, only because parents around the country were signing petitions and writing to their members of parliament and making their voices heard, did this Prime Minister finally show some leadership and support the welfare of kids. I say that is not good enough. It's time for the Prime Minister to show some leadership in the protection of our kids and introduce age verification for online porn, gambling and social media, at a minimum of 16 for social media. (Time expired)

Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

This bill, the Criminal Code Amendment (Deepfake Sexual Material) Bill 2024, will ban the non-consensual sharing of deepfake pornography, and it is essential because of a consequence of the time and the nature of technology in the era we live in and the acceleration of that technology. The new law will make it a criminal offence to share deepfake porn of someone without their consent. It seems bizarrely unnecessary that such a law would be needed if any common decency applied, but here we are.

Digitally created or altered sexually explicit material is a damaging form of abuse. It's most often used against women and girls, but it can be weaponised against anyone. The explosion and proliferation of artificial intelligence technology has made this bill urgent. It is a high-priority reform area for the government and is part of a suite of reforms to tackle online harms. I'm glad to see more urgent action, and I would like to see more urgent action, of course. But for all the many benefits of technology there are many negatives as well—scams, deepfakes, social media. I commend the government on the establishment of the social media committee. There are broad ideas and many ideas; we just heard some. But we have to get some societal consensus, and ideally some consensus across the parliament, on exactly what needs to be done. I know many members are passionate about it. The previous speaker is a friend of mine, but I think we need to be careful, in our passion, not to cast aspersions on each other's motives. Every member of this place wants to see children protected, but we need, in regulating and legislating, to make sure that things are practical, are workable and will actually make a difference to the problem. I may continue my remarks with another tie!

Debate interrupted.