MP Maria Miller wants a debate in the House of Commons on whether digitally generated nude photos should be prohibited.
It comes as another app that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to allow users to undress women in images spreads quickly on social media.
According to one expert, the website in question received over five million visitors in June alone.
Users claim to have nudified a number of celebrities, including one Olympic athlete.
DeepSukebe’s website claims to be able to “show the reality buried behind the garments.” It was launched in 2020, but no one knows who is behind it.
The BBC attempted to contact the company for comment but did not receive a response.
It is a “AI-leveraged nudifier” whose purpose is to “make all men’s dreams come true,” according to its Twitter page.
The developers also stated in a blog post that they are working on a more powerful version of the application.
Serious crime
Ms Miller told the BBC that it was time to think about banning such devices.
“I believe that if Parliament had the opportunity to debate whether nude and sexually explicit photos made digitally without consent should be illegal, the legislation would change.”
To reflect “the severity of the impact on people’s life,” she believes it should be illegal to distribute sexual photographs online without authorization.
“Software vendors are engaged in a very serious crime if they build this technology, and they should be forced to design their products to prevent this from happening.”
For the past six years, she has been fighting so-called revenge porn, which involves the distribution of nude or sexually explicit images without consent.
“At the moment, producing, capturing, or distributing without consent intimate sexual photos online or via digital technologies is largely illegal.”
Distributing sexual photographs online without consent should be considered a sexual offense, reflecting the seriousness of the impact on people’s lives.”
She hopes that the issue will be addressed in the upcoming Online Safety Bill.
Cease (Centre To End All Sexual Exploitation) informed the BBC that nudification tools should be addressed in the Bill as well.
“The law is insufficient in this area,” Vanessa Morse, the company’s CEO, said.
“Technology that is designed to objectify and humiliate women should be shut down,” she added, adding that porn sites that profit from the widespread sharing of these photos should be required to proactively restrict their upload.
She went on to say that putting the burden of proof on victims who are “frequently traumatized and humiliated” to get such photographs taken down from the internet is simply not fair.
Nudifiers, as they’re known, aren’t quite new.
DeepNude was launched in 2019, however after a reaction, the developers abruptly pulled the service and gave refunds.
They acknowledged that there was a “very high” chance that it would be misused, and that the world was not ready for such a divisive tool.
‘Not ethical’
However, comparable services continue to exist, with many of them based on the DeepNude source code, which was made public by the original developers.
While many websites yield sloppy, occasionally amusing results, the new one has a proprietary algorithm that, according to one analyst, “puts it years ahead of the competition.”
A developer behind one of the many nudification tools accessible online spoke with the BBC.
Ivan Bravo admitted that such creations “are not ethical, primarily in the way it is being used and in the way the original inventors began advertising it as ‘nude your friends’.”
“However, we don’t live in a perfect society, and people have always been looking for ways to do so, so it was only a matter of time before such a technology appeared.”
He went on to say that the fact that the technology could only nudify women at the moment was sexist.
“Perhaps a version for nude males and even imaginary characters, such as anime, might be created so that everyone can enjoy or try with this type of sexual entertainment.”
“The idea is to figure out what kinds of applications we can make of this technology while staying inside the legal and ethical framework.”
