Deepfake Ireland on Virgin Media: Gráinne Seoige’s distress in this grim film is palpable

Gráinne Seoige’s public persona is that of the understated and often sombre newsreader – giving us the facts and just the facts. So it is shocking to see her on the brink of tears as she recalls how she became the victim of deepfake pornography created using AI while canvassing for election in 2024.“It is so sickening that someone could do that to you,” she explains in Deepfake Ireland. (Virgin Media One, Monday, 9pm) This grim film sees Seoige revisiting her own experience of AI-generated deepfake images while looking at the wider issue of how misogyny is embedded in the source code of the internet. How it has become, in essence, a holy treatise of tech bro-dom that has brought immense pain to people around the world.Seoige’s distress as she recalls the incident makes for uncomfortable viewing and – as is only proper given the subject matter – the entire documentary has a skin-crawling quality: what a horrible world it is out there.Of course, “out there” in this context means the internet and the hellscape of social media, where more than 95 per cent of fake images are of women. “We’re there for their entertainment – there are no consequences,” says model and presenter Maria McGuigan, who, like Seoige, was targeted by deepfakers.READ MOREVictims are often extorted by their harassers – which can add to their trauma, says poet Darragh Fleming. Recalling his experience of being blackmailed over intimate images, he says that, to teenagers, “things like this are world-ending”. “I was blackmailed for nude images of myself – the stats around suicide linked to this, especially among teenagers, are really scary.”Seoige believes that, in her case, the image was “politically motivated” because it surfaced at a time when she was standing for election for Fianna Fáil in Galway West, and the action was intended to diminish and humiliate her in the eyes of voters. There was, she says, a perception that she was “a celebrity candidate – lightweight, ill-qualified to stand... this was done for a very specific reason”.Since then she has had nightmares in which faceless men attack her. Her experiences echo those of secondary school student Isabella, who, at age 15, was blackmailed with deepfake images and had dreams in which faceless men assaulted her. “It completely destabilises our sense of safety in the world,” says Seoige.But her nightmare is not over. She meets Žilvinas Padolskas of Dublin-based technology company Ceartas, where she discovers that further images taken from her Instagram account have been manipulated by deepfake software. This is news to Seoige, who is understandably appalled.The EU has announced a ban on AI “nudifier” apps that create non-consensual intimate imagery, to take effect from December 2026. But Seoige wonders if this will meaningfully improve the situation – changing the law is well and good, but how do you enforce the regulations?She’s not sure that this will be possible. “It’s absolutely disgusting,” she says. “It could not be more personal – it’s all about control over women.”