It’s the show campaigners have called “so insulting, so gross”: Vicky Pattison’s My Deepfake Sex Tape. “We’re actually going to produce our own deepfake, of me. And release that on social media sites,” Pattison tells Cathy Newman, Channel 4’s news anchor, who herself found she’d been deepfaked while researching the issue. Newman is gentle, reserved: she advises Pattison (in so many words) to stay well away from the cesspit she’s about to create. But she doesn’t ask the obvious, insistent question, and she’s Cathy Newman! It’s like putting Nigella next to an oven and not letting her cook. Why the hell, Vicky, are you doing this?
The premise is so wild, and when you try to get to its rationale, it gets even weirder. Let’s just say it’s true, that the best way to land a conversation about deepfake porn is if it’s fronted by someone of whom deepfakes exist. OK, there are thousands of them; but now let’s say you urgently need to show the footage, well, of course now you can’t use a real victim, because that would exacerbate the harm you’re trying to expose and ultimately eradicate. So now you need someone to consent to being deepfaked, and whoops, now you need two consenting porn actors, to film the scene and fake the presenter’s face on to it. Pattison chatting to the male lead is vividly funny, her conviviality pulling the project apart in real time. “If people thought I could nick a fella that’d look like you, I’d be over the moon,” she says. “I’d be thrilled to ribbons.” But guys! If Vicky consents, and the fella consents, and the Vicky-alike other actor consents, and they all have agency, this is as near as dammit to the opposite of what deepfake porn is.
People really like Pattison, and are inclined to help her. Even deepfake activists who wouldn’t take part (see “gross”) have taken to their socials saying they don’t blame her, they think she’s being played by producers. “It’s actually very clever,” Cara Hunter, the SDLP member at Stormont said, “and there’s such a bravery in you. I think, go for it.” One survivor, Sophie, who was deepfaked by her own brother-in-law, describes how it’s affected her, and it was galvanising. Cross-border legislation should exist, this is a violation. But if that’s what you decide, definitely don’t go to Charlotte Owen, Boris Johnson’s House of Lords appointee, who’s like W1A-in-ermine. “Unless we say this is illegal, tech’s not going to react,” she says. Her intention, in a private member’s bill, is to go after the individuals making images, rather than the platforms that publish them. Never upset the tech bros. Just cross your fingers, and hope they react.
The “undress” function Pattison uses on an image of herself on one “nudify” app shocks her way more than the video itself – it really is AI-generated, she really didn’t consent to it, she says it’s spookily accurate. The camera lingers on it for a surprisingly long time. Again, the intention and the execution seem actively at war; we’re meant to empathise with her sense of being debased, at the same time as roleplaying the audience that wants to see her breasts.
Still, at least no real horses were harmed in the making of this movie – no, wait, I don’t think Pattison’s husband was cock-a-hoop. “I know it’s a big ask,” she says at the start, “and I know we’ve just got married …” She’s 110% not asking him to be OK with it, which works, because he’s not OK. “Not ideal,” he concludes. “Regardless of whether it’s fake or not, you don’t want a sex tape of your missus being sent around.” Inevitable, but still neat: you make a sex tape that’s the opposite of a deepfake, and you land a point that’s the opposite of the truth. The real victim is the husband. He seems nice, though. Literally none of this is his fault.
After interviewing a teenager in Texas, Pattison explodes. “They’re on the other side of the world, and they’ve having exactly the same issues we have. A global issue of women, girls, having their consent taken away, and there isn’t a fucking thing we can do about it.” Isn’t there, though? If we didn’t start here?
Vicky Pattison: My Deepfake Sex Tape is on Channel 4 now.
