A man who posted non-consensual, pornified “deepfake” images of Australian women has been ordered to pay $343,500 in civil penalties for doing so by a federal court. Everyone, everywhere, should be thrilled by this decision.
What Anthony Rotondo did by uploading these images was perpetrate “image-based abuse” against his victims. It’s a wanton, wilful act of cruelty intended to harm and humiliate its targets, and it is against Australian law.
The case against Rotondo was initially brought by Australia’s online regulator, the eSafety commissioner, two years ago.
Before any brain-rotted internet apologist decides to leap in with the usual excuses for boys being boys, mistakes being made and girls being fair game, please note: when eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, issued a removal notice for the content, Rotondo claimed it meant nothing to him, and told her to get a warrant.
When a court subsequently did order Rotondo to remove the images and not to share them, his response was to email them to 50 addresses, including to Inman Grant herself.
The capacity for nastiness will ever flow and spread in poorly regulated spaces.
So it’s a relief that the court heeded the regulator’s recommendation that a significant penalty be imposed on Rotondo to practically – and culturally – discourage foul dickhead behaviour before it metastasises into something far worse than mere problematic scale.
Social normalisation.
I wrote in June last year of the shameful incident at Bacchus Marsh grammar school in which a teenage boy was arrested, and released with a caution, after 50 female students discovered deepfake pornographic images of themselves. A parent who happened to see the material threw up when she did.
Australians were so horrified, anti-deepfake legislation enjoyed bipartisan support and a speedy passage through the parliament.
In the wake of the hefty fine on Rotondo, let’s pop corks. Let’s throw confetti. In an internet-dominated world where vain techlords rule us by whim, sovereign governments seem reduced to the role of rearguard guerrillas.
This enforcement of law in Australia feels like the escape from Mos Eisley, if not yet the successful attack on the Death Star. Chalk up two skirmishes won by the local rebels, given Australia’s hugely popular ban on social media for children is also reminding governments that they might, actually, be able to spring Leia from Vader’s clutches if they try.
European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, praised the ban after Albanese’s recent speech about it at the UN. “Inspired by Australia’s example,” she said “we in Europe are watching and will be learning from you.”
Could courage be contagious? Let’s hope so, because in the absence of powerful regulation, the online normalisation of awful blooms like candida that itches as it cripples, and becomes increasingly difficult to shift.
Dare I remind everyone there was a time when trolls lived only in folktales, lies did not travel the world six times as fast as the truth, and “skibidi” was not a word, let alone a neat explanation for why people throw dildos at basketballers?
Every day, the news presents organised humanity with digital challenges we can ignore and let hurt us or apply the cream now to do something about.
This week alone, a “talent studio” advised it was taking bookings for an AI-created human-styled moving image made from the stolen parts of working actors. The US actors’ union, Sag-Aftra, is enraged; unlicensed, composite cartoon “Tilly Norwood” solves no talent problems, but creates them “using stolen performances to put actors out of work, jeopardising performer livelihoods and devaluing human artistry”.
Then Harvard research revealed that while the use of AI tools has been rushed into workplaces to drive productivity, it doesn’t: 95% of businesses see no measurable return for the low-quality “workslop” replacing human jobs and activity.
Oh, and I discovered there were whole YouTube channels dedicated to AI-created videos depicting pretty girls murdered violently, until YouTube recently removed them.
I watched the US president publish an AI-made video seemingly claiming magical beds from QAnon fairy stories were soon to be available to Americans (soon deleted). Then came some AI-generated, offensively-sombrero-themed propaganda denigrating a political opponent – and it’s still there.
Trumps’ political bete-noire, Democrat Gavin Newsom, responded with an AI-generated depiction of Trump’s VP, JD Vance, in his “Garbage Pail” memetic iteration making sexual allusions to a Chesterfield couch. Newsom’s response is simultaneously ugly, disillusioning and strategically appropriate to the new demands of political battle online.
But legislators don’t need to know an edgelord from a smol bean to bring the excrescence of tech under control.
Nathaniel Lubin from policy operation the Better Internet Initiative uses the metaphor of early water sanitation for the potential regulation of tech. British engineers had no knowledge of germ theory when they switched off the water source of a cholera epidemic. They just solved the problem in front of them and worked out the details from there.
The punishment of deepfakers, growing regulatory appetites and Denmark imposing copyright protection over people’s images are laudable efforts and should be loudly encouraged, especially given the Australian Productivity Commission’s shamefully naive recommendation the government allow data mining exemptions for tech companies to train AI models.
Advocates of internet regulation, restriction, bans and penalties are persistently demonised as “nanny-staters”. Yep, I love babies, the state should protect them, guilty as charged, bring it on.
There’s a reason nannies exist, fellas. It’s because you leave children unsupervised in dangerous places around dangerous tools, they get hurt. They die.
Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
