Why did this ACT MP make a deep fake nude of herself? (And how long did it take?)
Wednesday, 1 October 2025
ACT MP Laura McClure is completely nude, posing for the camera.
Except it is not Laura McClure - it is a highly realistic deep fake nude. And she has made it herself.
Laura is showing me the full range of nudes she generated using AI.
“Other than my staff, you're the only other person who's seen this, not even David [Seymour],” she said. “I don't want him to see these.”
Laura held up a censored deep fake nude of herself in Parliament in May. But she is showing me these extra images to demonstrate more of the scary reality of AI nudes.
The images are her face swapped seamlessly onto nude bodies.
“I wanted to show parents, and I wanted to show other people across the parliament how easy it was to do,” Laura said.
She shows me how to make a deep fake: it is just a couple of clicks past an age verification, then upload an image.
“It's scary, right? It is full on. You picture if you were a teenage girl and an image like this circulating of you,” she said.
But it gets much worse than this, said Laura: “The stories that I'm hearing from young people, it isn't just making you nude. It is generally putting you into some quite horrific, dehumanising pornography.”
DEEP FAKES ARE THE NEW FORM OF CYBERBULLYING FOR KIDS
Since her public display in Parliament, Laura has heard of many cases of deep fakes being used in cyberbullying.
“The most horrific case that I would say that I've been told about was a young girl, only year nine. She was deep faked into pornography by another classmate and that was shared throughout the school.”
Laura said in this case of AI bullying, the outcome was almost catastrophic.
“Unfortunately, her mental health declined.She didn't get the support she required and she actually attempted suicide, which is really sad.”
Laura has heard of other deep fake nude cases from other schools.
“A year 10 group of girls within a class having their image taken off the school class photo on the server and having them all put into a pornography.”
Laura said there is no law against creating deep fake porn like this.
While revenge porn is illegal - synthetic porn is not.
Laura wants to change that - and is trying to get support for a law change.
“The one thing that we could do right now would be to close the loophole in the Harmful Digital Communications Act and actually establish this as a crime,” she says.
ACT MP MAKES PADDY GOWER INTO A NUDE DEEP FAKE - AND GETS FREAK RESULT
To further raise awareness, and to show me how easy it is, Laura decides to “deep fake” me. With my permission of course.
She takes a snap, puts it through an app. Then a few clicks later, I’m nude. But, nude as a woman.
“And look, Paddy, that is concerning, but I'm also not really surprised considering the data from overseas shows us at 95 to 98% of the time, women are the targets of this kind of abuse”, she says.
SCHOOL STUDENTS: BLACKMAIL WITH NUDE DEEP FAKES IS THE NEW BULLYING TREND
A group of teenagers I met in Rotorua knew all about this issue.
They’ve grown up with smartphones and social media and told me how the online environment is “a really hard thing to navigate, especially when we're so young”.
They said the biggest thing they’re worried about is AI.
“It's slowly shifted from one evil to another, in a sense,” says Toby. “I see that a lot of people have begun to use a lot of deep fakes.”
And he tells me how teenagers use them to cyberbully.
“Someone took an image off social media and put them in a generator, and just… stripped them of their dignity and clothes, and then posted it onto a group chat.
“When I saw that, [I thought] it's really sickening and shocking,” he says.
Joseph tells me about a friend who got into some trouble with some people. They retaliated by making him look like a paedophile by “creating AI text messages depicting him as…talking to a young girl”.
“That really, you know, messed his brain up,” he says.
And they’re scared they’ll become victims too.
“The deep fakes and the blackmail It's, like, that threat is kind of just there, and it's not really a good thing to live with,” says Dilsher.
NETSAFE REVEALS INCREASE IN DEEP FAKE REPORTS
Netsafe’s latest figures show they’ve had 303 reports of deep fakes relating to manipulated imagery, videos or audio in the past year, up from 270 the year before.
Of those, more than 20% involved teenagers aged 13-17.
Netsafe is the approved agency to deal with online harm. It handles confidential reports and supports young people and their families when they’re the victims of online bullying.
Their helpline is free, confidential and non-judgemental.