Vicky Pattison: My Deepfake Sex Tape, review

Deepfake porn, if you remain blissfully unaware of the term, is the process of superimposing someone’s face onto a porn actress’s body using AI technology. Celebrities including Scarlett Johansson and Margot Robbie have been targeted in this way, but at least in those cases it’s obvious that the videos are bogus. The majority of victims are ordinary women who suddenly wake up to find disgusting images of themselves doing the rounds on Snapchat or WhatsApp, while their friends, neighbours and colleagues wonder if what they’re seeing is actually real.

Vicky Pattison: My Deepfake Sex Tape (Channel 4) is a documentary about how easy these videos are to make, who is behind them, and what – if anything – can be done about it. Pattison is a reality TV star who has always stood out, since her days on the terrible MTV series Geordie Shore, as thoughtful and smart. She’s also likeable, winning I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! a few years back, and is a natural presenter in front of the camera. She speaks to victims, police and politicians, including Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge, who became the youngest recipient of a life peerage when Boris Johnson included her in his resignation honours and who is campaigning for deepfake porn to be criminalised.

But the programme is based around a dubious idea which doesn’t seem to have worked. Pattison decides to create her own “sex tape” to highlight the issue. Why? It is never adequately explained, and seems even more wrongheaded when you see Pattison in tears over it, and her husband expressing his misgivings. She asks Lady Owen for advice. “Don’t do it,” is the sensible reply, ultimately ignored.

Pattison goes to the effort of hiring an intimacy coordinator, AI consultants, and two actors (she is an ‘adult content creator’ and he is a gay man who announces cheerfully that “this is the closest I’ll ever come to having sex with a woman”). They don’t actually have sex – it’s all simulated, although I still wouldn’t recommend watching this programme in a public place. Pattison’s face is then superimposed, and she posts the end result on social media.

I’m not sure what Pattison expected to happen here – presumably for the video to go viral, make headlines everywhere, and then the big reveal that it was all a stunt to show how believable these things can be. But it didn’t happen that way. In fact, to Pattison’s disappointment, some charities “aren’t quite as on board as we would have liked”, while some victims have said that the gimmick is disrespectful to real victims and trivialises what they have been through.

That’s a shame because the issue is an important one and will only get worse as the technology gets better. A 15-year-old girl spoke of the shame she felt when a video went around the school purporting to be of her. A classmate had made it. Pattison also looked up so-called “undressing apps” – you upload a photo, the AI strips off the clothes and puts the face on a very convincing naked body. It can be done in a matter of seconds. 

Pattison speaks to the anonymous owner of one of these apps, who admits that it’s highly unethical but it makes money. She asks why the technology only works on women (she proves this by uploading a picture of her husband, which comes back with his face on the body of a naked female). “The answer is simple,” the creator replies. “Just like many other things throughout history, men’s sexual desire has driven the development of technology like this.”

Pattison should be commended for highlighting this – yet another thing to warn our children about. But making her own fake sex tape? That should never have made it to the screen.