55AA Mornings with Graeme Goodings: Thursday 1 May 2025

 MEDIA TRANSCRIPT 

Radio Interview Thursday 1 May 2025 11:25am  

5AA Mornings with Graeme Goodings  

GRAEME GOODINGS, HOST: Joining me now is Connie Bonaros from SA-BEST, MLC. Deep fake laws are to be introduced. I want to find out more about it. Connie, good morning to you.  

THE HON CONNIE BONAROS, MLC: Good morning, Graeme, and good morning to your listeners.  

GOODINGS:  Now, for the sake of our listeners, explain, what is the issue with deepfakes? 

BONAROS: Yeah, I think it's important to start with a few facts, Graeme, because people don't really know necessarily what deepfakes are, but effectively, it's when artificial intelligence is made to create an image or a video using somebody's picture.  

GOODINGS: Right.  

BONAROS: So, I could take a photo now of you, I could put it into an app, an AI app, and I could create whatever image I wanted of you and whatever depiction I wanted to view.  
 
GOODINGS: And these look very realistic.  
   
BONAROS: They do look very realistic. They are responsible now for about 95% of all pornography online and almost 100% of the victims are women and girls. Explicit deep fakes, where you have put people in sexually explicit, in humiliating, degrading and invasive images, has increased year on year in Australia since 2019 by 550%.  
   
GOODINGS: Now, I just want to say, Connie, before you go ahead, for people who are not sure about deepfakes, you might have seen on social media, there might be Donald Trump doing a silly dance, somebody doing, you know, Anthony Albanese with a funny hat on and spinning his eyes around, and it's all very well and good and a bit of a laugh and so forth, but what you're talking about is far more sinister and dangerous.  
   
BONAROS: Absolutely. And that's what we've tried to capture in this bill. There are alarming statistics and they reflect that we've struggled to keep up with technology when it is used for sinister purposes. We're not suggesting that it can't be used for something that's trivial, innocent, but it should never be allowed to be used for sexually explicit purposes. It shouldn't be used without somebody's consent for something that is personally invasive, humiliating or degrading.  

And that then closes, really importantly, a potential loophole that exists in the laws because there will be arguments about whether a picture has been wholly made up of AI, whether it has been partly made up of AI, or whether indeed it is a real image. Now, if it's a real image, it's already 100% captured.  

What we've done yesterday with the government and the opposition and the cross bencher’s support, and I'm really grateful to the government because we've worked really collaboratively on this with the Attorney [General] and with the AI Assistant Minister Michael Brown is, we've put beyond a shadow of a doubt that uncertainty about whether the laws are tough enough to capture deep fake images that have been created using a depiction of somebody that, even if it just resembles me, it is hard to know, it is impossible to tell, whether that is a real or a fake picture once it's online. And the issue is that once it's out there, the damage is done. The reputational damage, the shame, the guilt, the embarrassment that someone feels as a victim, the damage is done. So we are effectively playing catch up a little bit, if you like, with respect to dealing with that aspect.  

GOODINGS:  So how do you address the aspect that a lot of these deep fakes could be coming in from overseas or the person remains anonymous?  

BONAROS: Yeah, it is easy enough online now to be… well, not easy enough, but there are mechanisms there to be able to track backwards, I guess, if you like, through IP addresses and so forth, the creators of this information. And it is even easier to then be able to track those people who continue to distribute it. You have to remember that this is being used, like we said, for very sinister purposes. So, you know, we know of cases where it's been created and a person has been blackmailed or threatened, you know, do something with me or pay me a certain amount of money, otherwise I will distribute these images. And they have profound impacts for victims in the worst cases always.  
 We've seen so many suicides as a result of these sorts of images and videos that depict somebody. And like I said before, almost, almost 100% now of victims are women and girls and their images are being used in very, very explicit pornographic material.  
   
GOODINGS: Well, Connie, let's hope your legislation achieves all that you hope it to, because there's no question that these deep fakes are causing anguish and pain and absolute terrible suffering to so many people. 5AA mornings with Graeme Goodings.  

ENDS.