Dissemination of deepfakes 'will be the abuse scandal of the 21st century', Gráinne Seoige to tell media committee 

Gráinne Seoige, a former television personality, contested the general election for Fianna Fáil in Galway West in 2024. During the campaign, explicit deepfake images of her were created using AI. Picture: Marc O'Sullivan

The creation and dissemination of deepfake explicit images will be the “abuse scandal of the 21st century if we do not act now”, television presenter Gráinne Seoige is set to tell TDs and senators.

Ms Seoige, a former Fianna Fáil election candidate, is expected to tell the Oireachtas media committee that neither the gardaí nor social media site Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, can “credibly claim that the current legislation is fit for purpose”.

She will also argue that when she went to the gardaí about deepfakes, they were unable to progress an investigation due to the unwillingness of others to cooperate.

Ms Seoige, a former television personality, contested the general election for Fianna Fáil in Galway West in 2024. During the campaign, explicit deepfake images of her were created using AI.

She is expected to explain that since appearing on RTÉ’s Prime Time last week, she received hundreds of messages, including from “parents of teenagers and women who have had the exact same experience”.

She will say: “Like me, they followed all the processes ministers have spoken about over the past week — reporting serious complaints to An Garda Síochána, reporting to Facebook, X, and other social media platforms in an effort to seek justice for themselves or their daughters and at a minimum to get the distribution of the images to stop.

Yet repeatedly they hit dead ends and were told by An Garda Síochána that they did not have sufficient powers to identify perpetrators or to compel others to identify perpetrators, which was also the situation in my case.

Ms Seoige will say that her case “hit a dead end” and “even though the AI-generated pornographic image of me was shared hundreds, if not thousands, of times across WhatsApp, the law as it stands, and certainly Meta, place the burden on the victim to identify every individual in the chain of dissemination”.

She will argue that “privacy and encryption cannot be allowed [to] trump criminal behaviour” and companies such as Meta must be “compelled by law to build technology that allows victims identify criminal materials on their platform, identify the perpetrators and enable privacy to continue to be protected”.

“Otherwise, they are like an airport that allows drugs freely through its security onto their planes,” Ms Seoige will say.

She will also state that “if Grok and equivalent apps are the nuclear warheads, then WhatsApp is the Enola Gay — the aircraft that drops the bomb” and that “both must be tackled head-on by legislators”.

“Ireland has faced many abuse scandals where systemic failure by authorities was later acknowledged,” she will also say.

“This will be the abuse scandal of the 21st century if we do not act now.”

Ms Seoige will also ask TDs and Senators to be invited back to the committee “if this issue is not adequately addressed through legislation in the coming months”.

• Louise Burne is Political Correspondent.