David Pocock (ACT, Independent) | Hansard source

I rise to speak on my private senator's bill, the Online Safety and Other Legislation Amendment (My Face, My Rights) Bill 2025. In this place, we often talk about the long-term challenges facing our communities. Over the past year, whether it's been through the Select Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence, in town halls I've held across Canberra, in mobile offices across Canberra or in hearing from experts and advocates, everyday Canberrans have got in touch to raise their concerns about artificial intelligence and deepfakes.

We are seeing an unprecedented rise in the use of artificial intelligence. We hear much about the benefits—benefits to productivity, benefits to the economy—but we also need to be very clear eyed about the not-insignificant downsides to this technology. There are very real risks to our privacy, our democracy, our safety and, I believe, our humanity—the thing that makes us human and allows us to function in the community.

Currently, our laws are falling dangerously behind. We essentially have no regulatory guardrails to stop the malicious use of AI to generate deepfakes other than for sexually explicit images, and that is clearly not enough. Everyone would agree that generating sexually explicit images and videos of someone is not something we should stand for. But I believe we need to go one step further and say to Australians, 'You own your face, you own your likeness and no-one can create a realistic, AI generated deepfake of you without your consent.'

We're seeing artificial intelligence weaponised in ways that are exploitative and damaging to our shared life together. They are beginning to, and will continue to, tear at the very fabric of our society. We're seeing a rise in sophisticated impersonation scams, like the one the ones featuring Alan Kohler. These scams rob hardworking people of their savings. We're seeing fake political footage explicitly designed to mislead Australians and distort democratic processes. Each time AI is used to deceive, it chips away at the trust that underpins our institutions and tears at the social fabric of our communities.

The my-face my-rights bill operates on a very simple commonsense principle: an individual's face, voice and likeness are intrinsic to their identity as a human and should not be used without their consent. We should be able to protect our identity in the digital world just as fiercely as we protect it in the physical world. I do not think the government's current approach is sufficient. We need to stop using guidelines and expectations and start giving Australians actual protections. This bill does just that. It provides a structural response, introducing two key pillars of reform to give people whose identity has been used without their consent meaningful avenues for redress.

First, this bill amends the Online Safety Act to empower the eSafety Commissioner. It establishes a dedicated, streamlined complaints system specifically for the non-consensual sharing of deepfake material. It grants the commissioner powerful new tools to issue removal notices to social media platforms, hosting services and individual end users, legally compelling them to take down fabricated content. Furthermore, it introduces strict civil penalties, including a 500 penalty-unit fine for users who post deepfakes without consent or for service providers who ignore a removal notice. If platforms and perpetrators do the wrong thing, there will finally be real, enforceable consequences.

Second, this bill amends the Privacy Act to establish a new civil cause of action. Current laws regarding image based abuse, defamation and privacy simply do not cover the unique harms of deepfakes. This legislation creates a statutory cause of action for the wrongful use or disclosure of deepfake material. It empowers individuals to bring civil proceedings against anyone who knowingly or recklessly uses their likeness without consent to cause detriment or turn a profit. Victims will be able to seek court ordered remedies, including injunctions to halt the spread of the material, mandatory apologies and correction orders.

Crucially, this legislation recognises that you do not need to suffer financial ruin to be fundamentally harmed. The damage caused by deepfakes is deeply emotional and reputational. Under this bill, victims can pursue action and be awarded damages for emotional distress and psychological harm without needing to prove financial loss. This is about restoring dignity and personal autonomy.

Good policy must always strike a sensible balance. We must ensure that these vital new protections do not unreasonably infringe upon freedom of expression or the public interest. This is why I've consulted widely to ensure this bill includes targeted, pragmatic exemptions. These rules will not apply to the legitimate use of material by journalists acting under professional standards, by law enforcement acting in good faith, by individuals under 18 years of age or for material used for genuine medical, scientific or legal proceedings.

We don't have to look very far to see the disruptive, sometimes disastrous, consequences of failing to regulate technology before it runs rampant. We don't have to wait for a crisis to overwhelm us, and we shouldn't have to wait for the major parties to slowly catch up to reality when it comes to artificial intelligence. We have an opportunity to set a world-leading standard that protects humans, that protects Australians, their personal identity and the integrity of our democracy. We need to find the political courage to act now, to stand up to these big multinational AI companies and actually say: 'There are things that we value as a country, as communities, as human beings, and we will not allow you to undermine that. We will not allow you to use your technology in a way that is disruptive, in a way that is damaging and in a way that chips away at an already fraying social compact in this country between fellow citizens and between elected representatives, the parliament, and the institutions that are meant to be there to serve them and the Australian people.'

Much work has gone into this bill, and I'd like to thank my team for their work on it. I'd like to thank the amazing drafters in this place for their work in drafting and working through some of the technical challenges of this bill. I'd like to thank the many, many Canberrans who've been in touch on this issue and who have helped inform the design of this bill.

We know that this is an issue that's not going away. It's only getting worse. The rapid advancement of AI technology is such that a deepfake video from a year ago cannot be compared to what you can produce today. We have some warnings from the very people who are profiting from this. The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, said:

Very soon the world is going to have to contend with incredible video models that can deepfake anyone or kind of show anything you want.

He's warned that it'll bring really strange or scary moments and erode trust in video as a record of truth. Separately on AI enabled fraud, he said he is very nervous that we have a significant impending fraud crisis, calling reliance on voiceprint authentication crazy because AI has fully defeated it.

Yoshua Bengio, who's a Turing Award winner and one of the most cited AI researchers in the world, warned that AI capable of persuading people could be used to influence political opinion and destabilise democracies. He has urged governments to move quickly to rule against counterfeiting humans by AI bots. Nina Schick, the author of Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse, warns of a coming 'infocalypse' in which it becomes nearly impossible to tell what is real, undermining public trust in politics and creating a liar's dividend where the existence of deepfakes lets bad actors dismiss genuine evidence as fake.

This is not the world we want to live in, and we have an opportunity as a parliament to change that. We have an opportunity as a Senate to send a very clear message that we will not stand for this. We actually want an Australia where people can believe what they see, where people can engage in good faith. And so I would commend this bill to the Senate in good faith. If there are issues that people have with it, I am obviously very open to discussing amendments and really trying to ensure that we have something that every senator in this place says is the right direction for our country. These are the right rules and safeguards that we need to have against the misuse of artificial intelligence. Again, we hear so much about the benefits. This is about saying, 'Yes, there are benefits, but we have to guard against the harms and guard against the misuse of this technology'. And so I commend this bill to the Senate.