Australian pleads guilty to creating deepfake porn in landmark case

William Hamish Yeates, 19, pleaded guilty to four offenses, including creating or altering sexual material without consent and distributing it, as well as using a carriage service in a harassing or offensive way. This marks the first prosecution under Australia's new national law, which criminalizes the manipulation of sexual images and carries a maximum penalty of seven years in prison. Yeates had distributed images of his alleged victim across multiple X accounts without her consent.

Deepfake pornography, often created using artificial intelligence technology, is identified by experts as a new frontier of gendered, image-based abuse and school bullying. The vast majority of this material overwhelmingly targets women and girls.

Australia's internet regulator, the eSafety Commission, has actively warned about the rising threat of AI-manipulated content. The commission has been advocating to ban apps that 'nudify' subjects within Australia, noting a 550% year-on-year increase in explicit deepfakes online since 2019. Statistics indicate that pornographic videos constitute 98% of deepfake material online, with 99% of that imagery depicting women and girls.