LAHORE: Pakistani politician Uzma Bukhari is upset over a fake photo of herself — a sexualized deepfake video has been released to defame her role as one of the country’s few female leaders.
“I was devastated when it came to my attention,” said Bukhari, 48, the information minister of Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province.
Deepfakes — which turn real audio, photos or video of people into fake likenesses — are becoming increasingly convincing and easy to create as artificial intelligence (AI) enters the mainstream.
In Pakistan, where media literacy is poor, they are being used as weapons to sexually vilify women in the public sphere, severely damaging their reputation in the conservative country.
Bukhari — who regularly appears on TV — recalls being silent until the days when she saw a video of her face on an Indian actor’s sexual body in a clip that went viral on social media.
“It was very difficult, I was depressed,” she told AFP at her home in the eastern city of Lahore.
“My daughter, she hugged me and said: ‘Mama, you have to fight this’.
After initially backing down, she is pressing her case in the Lahore High Court, trying to nab those spreading the deepfakes.
“When I go to court, I have to remind people again and again that I have a fake video,” she said.
In Pakistan – a country of 240 million people – internet usage has grown at an alarming rate recently thanks to cheap 4G mobile internet.
About 110 million Pakistanis were online this January, up 24 million from the start of 2023, according to monitoring site Data Report.
In this year’s election, deep faxes were at the center of the digital debate.
Former Prime Minister Imran Khan was jailed but his team used an AI tool to create speeches in his voice shared on social media, allowing him to campaign from behind bars. were
Men in politics are usually criticized for corruption, their ideology and status. But deepfakes have a dark side that’s uniquely suited to tearing women apart.
“When they’re accused, it almost always revolves around their sex lives, their personal lives, whether they’re good mothers, whether they’re good wives,” said US-based AI expert Henry Ajder. ”
“Deepfakes are a very damaging weapon for him,” he told AFP.
The stakes are high in patriarchal Pakistan.
Women’s status is usually tied to their “honor”, which is usually defined as modesty and chastity. Hundreds are killed each year — often by their own families — supposedly for defaming it.
Bukhari called the video targeting him “obscene”.
But in a country where premarital sex and cohabitation are punishable offences, deepfakes can damage reputations by indecent cuddling with men or suggesting inappropriate social interaction.
In October, AFP debunked a deeply fake video of regional lawmaker Mina Majeed showing her hugging the male chief minister of Balochistan province.
A social media caption said: “Shamelessness knows no bounds. This is an insult to Baloch culture.
Bukhari says her photos with her husband and son have also been manipulated to mean she appears in public with boyfriends outside of her marriage.
And doctored videos of Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif — Bukhari’s boss — regularly circulate, showing her dancing with opposition leaders.
Sadaf Khan of the Pakistani non-profit Media Matters for Democracy said that once such deeply flawed women are targeted, women’s “image is seen as immoral, and the entire family is disrespected.” .
“It could put them in danger,” he told AFP.
Deepfakes are now widespread around the world, but Pakistan has legislation to combat their deployment in disinformation campaigns.
In 2016, Buhari’s party passed a law “to curb online crime” that prohibits “cyberstalking” from sharing images or videos without consent “in a manner that harms a person”. The provisions of
Bukhari believes it needs to be strengthened and help investigators. “Enhancing the capabilities of our cybercrime unit is critical,” he said.
But digital rights activists have also criticized the government for enacting such sweeping legislation to stifle dissent. Authorities previously blocked YouTube and TikTok, and a ban on X — formerly Twitter — has been in place since the February election when allegations of vote-rigging on the site surfaced. Nighat Dad, a Pakistan-based digital rights activist, said blocking sites only serves as a “quick fix for the government”. “This is violating other fundamental rights, which are linked to your freedom of expression and access to information,” he told AFP.