Deepfake

UK law does not treat 'deepfake' as a single legal category; instead a patchwork of criminal offences has been built up to catch specific harms. The starting point is the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which already makes it an offence to share or threaten to share an intimate image, including a deepfake, without consent - the government has confirmed that 'it is already an offence to share or threaten to share intimate images, including deepfakes, under the Sexual Offences Act 2003' following amendments made by the Online Safety Act 2023. Since September 2024 sharing intimate image offences have also been designated priority offences under the Online Safety Act, meaning regulated platforms must proactively find and remove this content or face enforcement action from Ofcom.

The law was extended further in 2025 to tackle the creation (not just the sharing) of sexually explicit deepfakes. The government tabled an amendment to the Data (Use and Access) Bill that 'will criminalise intentionally creating a sexually explicit deepfake without consent, and either with intent to cause alarm, humiliation, or distress, or for the purpose of sexual gratification and without reasonable belief in consent'. The Ministry of Justice described the new offence as applying to 'purported sexual images', including images that appear to show a person naked or engaged in a sexual act - covering both wholly fabricated content and digitally altered real images. On conviction for creating such an image, 'those found guilty face an unlimited fine'; sharing the resulting image can additionally engage the pre-existing intimate image sharing offences, which carry the prospect of imprisonment. Outside the sexual-image context, deepfakes depicting a person saying or doing something false can still give rise to civil claims in defamation or misuse of private information, and processing someone's image or voice to create synthetic content will usually involve personal data processing regulated under UK GDPR.