Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what assessment he has made of potential merits of bringing forward legislative proposals to regulate the (a) detection, (b) prevention and (c) removal of deepfake images created by generative Artificial Intelligence.

Government made a clear manifesto commitment to ban the creation of sexually explicit deepfake images and we are bringing forward legislation to honour that commitment in the Crime and Policing Bill.

Under the Online Safety Act, it is already a criminal offence to share or threaten to share a sexually explicit deepfake.

We have designated the most harmful forms of deepfakes as priority illegal content, including child sexual exploitation and abuse and intimate image abuse. Services in scope will need to take proactive steps to prevent priority illegal content from appearing on their service and remove it quickly when it does.