Recently, young man of South Australia has avoided jail time despite being found guilty of creating an AI-assisted pornographic deepfake images of a 17—year-old girl and distributing those images on the web, reported ABC News Australia.
The court let 20-year-old William Hamish Yeates go on a recognisance release order after he pleaded guilty to the charges but denied malicious intent, which the court found credible. At the time of his deepfake porno mage creation and sharing offense, Yeates was 18 while his victim was 17 (now they are 20 and 19 respectively).
Did the court do the right thing or encouraged such offenses by going soft on Yeates and letting his victim down? Collective Shout issued the following statement in response to the lenient sentencing of Yeates.
| A precedent has been set in the first ever Australian prosecution of a then 18-year-old male student who used AI to produce and disseminate deepfake pornographic images of a 17-year-old girl. And it’s not a good one.
William Hamish Yeates, 20, appeared in the District Court of South Australia yesterday charged with creating sexually explicit images and videos of his Mercedes College classmate – which he shared over a period of months. The first time the female student saw her graduation photos was on a porn site. While acknowledging the girl’s trauma, degradation and humiliation, Judge Anne Barnett decided to suspend a two-year sentence because of the Adelaide law student’s “prior good character” and “undiagnosed issues” including autism. As the sentence was handed down, it was reported the young woman at the centre of the case put her head in her hands and wept. Collective Shout fought for laws to criminalise perpetrators who create and distribute these images. Members of our team are also survivors of Image Based Sexual Abuse. However, with Australia’s first ever ruling on production and sharing of non-consensual AI-generated sexual material, we are deeply disappointed. Other courts will look to this precedent to determine rulings on related cases. Potential perpetrators will weigh up the risks and may think on balance they are worth it, before weaponing digital tools of abuse against their intended targets. This does not auger well for women and girls who are mostly the victims of deepfake porn production using their images. Yeates’ harassing and degrading behaviour and yesterday’s court decision leaves the teen victim with life-long trauma – and puts at risk even more girls likely to suffer the same fate. |
