In the short doco My Blonde GF, British writer Helen Mort talks about discovering her face has been used in fake images posted on a porn site.
The huge surge in deepfake and revenge porn images – which almost exclusively target women – is a "dark symptom of isolation" in our culture, says the film's director Rosie Morris.
Rosie Morris Photo: Jack Bradley
Rosie tells Kim Hill she first got interested in Helen's story because the images of her face used in the deepfakes – "Helen on holiday, Helen at a graduation, Helen at a party at university" – were rather everyday images that she hadn't ever shared online.
When she discovered the deepfakes were on a porn site and went to the police, Helen was told because they were not "real" images no action could be taken.
"She then was left to live with that, which I think was a big burden. It made the whole experience a lot worse. She felt she had absolutely no control over what had happened.
"Helen's a writer with a feminist slant in her writing and she has wondered if that has contributed to why somebody might want to do this, which makes it feel even worse."
Helen had to reckon with images of her face that corresponded to memories of deep personal significance being inserted into violent, sexually explicit scenes of humiliation, Rosie says.
"She can no longer look at the image without seeing it in this new context. The original memory has been completely kind of bulldozed by how she's now seeing those images."
- READ: Helen Mort: How did deepfake images of me end up on a porn site? (Guardian)
Helen has spoken about her experience to help raise awareness and contributed to a campaign to change UK laws to make the distribution of deepfake images illegal in the absence of consent.
It's not expected that a law change would prevent people from creating and distributing deepfakes, Rosie says, but it would hopefully give victims more power to get the images taken off the internet.
"It's really important for those that it happens to, to know that there's something they can do or that the legal system is trying in some way to protect them."
One of the things Rosie admires about how Helen has handled this really difficult situation is that she hasn't stopped trusting people or driven herself mad trying to figure out who did it.
Helen realises that this kind of violation of another person's image could be carried out by anyone, Rosie says, and also could have happened to anyone.
As a filmmaker, she didnt want to get into the headspace of this particular perpetrator.
"I realised that the more we kept you in [Helen's] experience, and communicated that paranoia, without going too deeply into who might have done it, the more it would help you to really understand that impact."
Helen Mort in a still from "My Blonde GF" Photo: supplied
The film's title My Blonde GF comes from the text caption that accompanied one of the deepfake images of Helen posted on the porn site and also the title of a poem she wrote subsequently.
Helen was effectively given the title 'My Blonde GF' by the porn site, Rosie says, and she wanted to give the doco that name as a way for her to reclaim it.
Although 'My Blonde GF' is a common porn search term, the film now comes up as the top result in a Google search, she adds.
For Helen, speaking publicly about her deepfake porn experience hasn't been without difficulty, though, Rosie says.
"People often don't speak about these things happening because they know others will try and find the images... and there'll be backlash.
"Helen has had to weigh up... her mission and what she wants. She's a writer, she has a platform, she uses words to try and understand things. I think for her, speaking out was the processing. And it's not for everyone, you know, it wouldn't be for everyone to do that. So I'm really grateful to Helen that she has done that, that that's a choice that she's made."
In an upcoming feature-length documentary, Rosie will further explore how female identity is affected by our online lives and digital image culture.
She's also interested in investigating other situations women are somehow rendered powerless, such as the increased incidence of drink-spiking in the UK post-Covid.
"For me, that's coming from the same place as [deepfake and revenge porn]. This desire to render somebody power, powerless."
