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An Italian court has asked Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to testify in July in a civil lawsuit against two men allegedly involved in creating deepfake pornographic videos using her likeness and posting them online.
Meloni is seeking compensation from a 40-year-old and his 73-year-old father over the deepfake pornographic videos, which were uploaded to an American porn website in 2020 (before she became PM) and viewed millions of times, according to the indictment, the BBC reported.
Meloni has been asked to testify in a trial on July 2 in Sassari, Sardinia, and is seeking a “symbolic” sum of €100,000 in damages, which she has pledged to donate to a fund to support women who are victims of domestic violence, her lawyer said.
The lawsuit is meant to “send a message to women who are victims of this kind of abuse of power not to be afraid to press charges,” the lawyer added.
A deepfake is an image or video that has been digitally manipulated to superimpose a person’s face onto another body. The technology has become increasingly common, raising concerns about its role in both political disinformation and online sexual harassment.
Italy is set to present legislation to regulate AI later this month, hot on the heels of the EU’s landmark AI Act, which the European Parliament rubber-stamped last week.
Deepfakes are not illegal in Europe under the EU’s new AI rulebook, but content creators must be transparent about their origins. The EU is also requiring large tech platforms, including TikTok, X and Facebook, to identify AI-generated content under its content moderation law, the Digital Services Act.
