Deepfakes weaponised to target Pakistan's women leaders

Pakistani politician Azma Bukhari is haunted by a counterfeit image of herself - a sexualised deepfake video published to discredit her role as one of the nation's few female leaders.

"I was shattered when it came into my knowledge," said 48-year-old Bukhari, the information minister of Pakistan's most populous province of Punjab.

Deepfakes - which manipulate genuine audio, photos or video of people into false likenesses - are becoming increasingly convincing and easier to make as artificial intelligence (AI) enters the mainstream.

In Pakistan, where media literacy is poor, they are being weaponised to smear women in the public sphere with sexual innuendo deeply damaging to their reputations in a country with conservative mores.

Bukhari - who regularly appears on TV - recalls going quiet for days after she saw the video of her face superimposed on the sexualised body of an Indian actor in a clip quickly spreading on social media.

"It was very difficult, I was depressed," she said in her home in the eastern city of Lahore.

"My daughter, she hugged me and said: 'Mama, you have to fight it out'."

After initially recoiling she is pressing her case at Lahore's High Court, attempting to hold those who spread the deepfake to account.

"When I go to the 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 use has risen at staggering rates recently owing to cheap 4G mobile internet.

Around 110 million Pakistanis were online this January, 24 million more than at the beginning of 2023, according to the monitoring site DataReportal.

In this year's election, deepfakes were at the centre of digital debate.

Ex-prime minister Imran Khan was jailed but his team used an AI tool to generate speeches in his voice shared on social media, allowing him to campaign from behind bars.

Men in politics are typically criticised over corruption, their ideology and status. But deepfakes have a dark side uniquely suited to tearing down women.

"When they are accused, it almost always revolves around their sex lives, their personal lives, whether they're good mums, whether they're good wives," said US-based AI expert Henry Ajder.

"For that deepfakes are a very harmful weapon," he said.