Malaysia's Parliament Faces Porn's Deepfake Wave, Urges AI Rules

Deepfake illustration (photo: Freepic)

JAKARTA - Malaysian authorities are facing renewed pressure to impose criminal acts against sexually explicit content created using Artificial Intelligence (AI).

This call comes after a fraudster commits extortion will spread content made by AI deepfake porn and ask several lawmakers for thousands of dollars in ransom.

While the authorities are considering how to handle the case, the supervisory agency and civil society warn against seeing the law as a solution.

According to Mediha Mahmood, the Chief Executive of the Multimedia Communication and Content Forum (CMCF) of the incident showed wider problems.

"When legislators are intimidated with fake content, the real target is public trust, so this is a national concern," told The Straits Times.

For information, the CMCF or Content Forum is an independent forum for content industry players operating under the auspices of the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC).

For five days since September 12, 10 lawmakers and senators, including Communication Minister Fahmi Fadzil and former Economy Minister Rafizi Ramli, have been victims of extortion.

They said the fraudsters threatened to release a deepfake video depicting them having sex if they didn't pay 100,000 US dollars or around Rp1.67 billion.

Experts say that the main problem is a legal system that has difficulty balancing technological developments, especially artificial intelligence.

While existing laws such as the Criminal Code and the Communications and Multimedia Act (CMA) are technically applicable, the law is not designed to deal with synthetic media, or content generated by a generative AI.

"The law already exists, but the context of crimes committed using AI does not fully match the definition of the crime, especially if there is no real loss caused by AI abuse," said Melissa Lim, an AI law researcher at the Sinar Project.

At the same time, Malaysian authorities are trying to take steps to overcome this legislative gap.