Pakistani politician Azma Bukhari is troubled by a fake image of herself – an erotic deepfake video published to discredit her role as one of the country’s few female leaders.
“I was devastated when this came to my knowledge,” said 48-year-old Bukhari, the information minister of Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province.
As artificial intelligence (AI) goes mainstream, deepfakes – which misrepresent real audio, photos or videos of people – are becoming increasingly credible and easy to create.
In Pakistan, where media literacy is poor, they are being weaponized to accuse women of sexual harassment in the public sphere, deeply damaging their reputation in a country with conservative customs.
Bukhari – who regularly appears on TV – remembers being silent for days after watching a video of her face superimposed on an Indian actor’s sexualized body in a clip that quickly spread 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: ‘Mom, you have to fight this’.”
After initially backing out, she is pressing her case in the Lahore High Court, attempting to hold those spreading deepfakes accountable.
“When I go to court I have to remind people again and again that I have a fake video,” she said.
‘A very harmful weapon’
In Pakistan – a country of 240 million people – Internet usage has increased dramatically recently due to cheap 4G mobile Internet.
According to monitoring site DataReportal, about 110 million Pakistanis were online this January, 24 million more than at the beginning of 2023.
Deepfakes were at the center of the digital debate in this year’s election.
Former Prime Minister Imran Khan was jailed, but his team used AI tools to deliver speeches in his voice that were shared on social media, allowing him to campaign from behind bars.
Men in politics are usually criticized for corruption, their ideology and positions. But deepfakes also have a dark side that is perfect for humiliating women.
“When they are accused, it almost always revolves around their sex lives, their personal lives, whether they are good mothers, whether they are good wives,” said US-based AI expert Henry Ajder.
“Deepfakes are a very harmful weapon for this,” he told AFP.
The stakes are high in patriarchal Pakistan.
Women’s status is generally linked to their “honor”, generally defined as modesty and chastity. Hundreds of people are murdered each year – often by their own families – allegedly for defaming it.
Bukhari has described the video targeting him as “obscene”.
But in a country where premarital sex and cohabitation are punishable crimes, deepfakes could undermine reputations by spreading rumors suggesting hugs or inappropriate social interaction with men.
In October, AFP debunked a deepfake video of regional lawmaker Meena Majeed, in which she was seen hugging the male chief minister of Balochistan province.
One social media caption said: “Shamelessness knows no limits. This is an insult to Baloch culture.”
Bukhari says that photographs with her husband and son have also been doctored to make it appear that she had appeared in public with her boyfriend outside her marriage.
And doctored videos of Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif – Bukhari’s boss – regularly circulate, showing her dancing with opposition leaders.
Once targeted by such deepfakes, women’s “image is considered immoral, and the respect of the entire family is lost”, said Sadaf Khan of Pakistani media non-profit Matters for Democracy.
“It could put them in danger,” he told AFP.
fight fake
Deepfakes are now prevalent around the world, but Pakistan has legislation to deal with their deployment in disinformation campaigns.
In 2016, a law “to prevent online crimes” was passed by Bukhari’s party, with “cyberstalking” provisions against sharing photos or videos without consent “in a manner that causes harm to a person.”
Bukhari believes it needs to be strengthened and supported by investigators. “Building the capacity of our cyber crime unit is very, very important,” he said.
But digital rights activists have also criticized the government for using such a sweeping law to suppress dissent.
Authorities have previously blocked YouTube and TikTok, and a ban on X — formerly Twitter — has been in place since the February elections when allegations of vote tampering spread on the site.
Pakistan-based digital rights activist Nighat Dad said that blocking sites is only “a quick fix for the government”.
“This is a violation of other fundamental rights, which are related to your freedom of expression and access to information,” he told AFP.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
