Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what steps she is taking to protect children in a) Newcastle-under-Lyme and b) Staffordshire from becoming victims of indecent deepfakes.

The Government is committed to tackling the atrocious harm of child sexual exploitation and abuse.

UK law is clear – creating, possessing, or distributing child sexual abuse images, including those that are AI generated, is already illegal, and the Online Safety Act requires services to proactively identify and remove such content.

We are taking further action in the Crime and Policing Bill. We are introducing an offence to criminalise AI models which have been optimised to create child abuse material and have tabled amendments to support the stringent testing of AI systems for child sexual abuse material risks.