Germany proposes law to ban sexualized deepfakes after scandal

A deepfake pornography scandal involving popular German actresses and TV presenter Collien Fernandes may lead to new legislation against digital violence that aims to prohibit the creation of non-consensual synthetic nudes.

German Federal Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig presented a draft law last week that tackles a number of actions that can be classified as “digital violence,” including the creation and distribution of intimate images and videos as well as cyberstalking.

“It is not the victims who should be silenced, but the perpetrators – and digital violence must finally be consistently punished,” says Hubig.

The German Ministry of Justice has proposed changes to the German Criminal Code (StGB) punishing the dissemination of computer-generated content that can “significantly damage the reputation of a living or deceased person” with up to two years in prison. In cases involving images of children or adolescents, harsher penalties may apply, Heise reports.

Germany was rocked last month after Fernandes accused her husband, actor and TV host Christian Ulmen, of sending fake, sexualized images to various men. Ulmen was also accused of creating a manipulated version of her voice to have explicit phone conversations, leading around 30 men to believe they were having an online relationship with her, according to AFP.

“I expect harsher penalties in Germany to make it clear to perpetrators that this is unacceptable!” says Fernandes.

Fernandes’s attorney has described the violation as a “digital Pelicot case,” referencing French rape survivor Gisele Pelicot, who was drugged by her husband and assaulted by unknown men while unconscious.

The TV presenter received support from a group of 250 women from politics, business and culture, which published 10 “demands,” including criminalizing non-consensual sexualised deepfakes.

The German government has advocated tougher action against AI-generated nudes even before the Fernandes case. Minister Hubig described the proliferation of sexualized nudes on social platform X as “appalling” and called for greater accountability of tech platforms.

Harvard law professor Rebecca Tushnet, however, says that it would be hard to put the genie back into the bottle. While large companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI have put guardrails against sexualized deepfakes, their creation is still possible through numerous “nudify” apps, the co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society told NPR.

“My honest guess is that what we will continue to have is a situation where the well-capitalized, you know, prominent ones – possibly with the exception of Grok – are built with guardrails that prevent this kind of thing, or at least try very hard to prevent this kind of thing,” says Tushnet. “But there’s a sort of little substrate of scammy (ph) little apps that offer and sometimes deliver the ability to do this for people who are willing to go looking.”

The U.S. Congress passed the TAKE IT DOWN Act in 2025, requiring platforms to remove offensive, deepfake content. But this doesn’t prevent such images from being reposted elsewhere or slightly tweaked and reposted, adds Tushnet.

In March, EU lawmakers voted on banning AI systems generating sexualized deepfakes after a backlash from European governments over millions of sexualised deepfakes produced by X’s AI chatbot Grok.

The owner of X, Elon Musk, was summoned by French prosecutors as part of an investigation into Grok and other issues related to the platform, including interference in domestic politics. The tech entrepreneur did not appear at a voluntary interview on Monday.

Musk has also been placed under investigation by the European Commission over Grok’s production of sexualized images.

Article Topics

AI fraud  |  deepfakes  |  generative AI  |  Germany  |  legislation