Description: Between March 2023 and May 2024, Brandon Tyler of Essex used AI to generate explicit deepfake pornography of at least 20 women he knew personally, including a 16-year-old. He manipulated their social media photos and shared them, along with their personal details, in online forums promoting sexual violence. He was sentenced to five years in prison in April 2025 under the UK's criminal law against sharing sexually explicit deepfakes, in what is one of the first major prosecutions of its kind.
Editor Notes: Notes on the timeline: Brandon Tyler's actions reportedly began sometime in March 2023 and continued until May 2024, which is when he was arrested. He was sentenced on April 4, 2025 (which is the incident date selected for this incident ID). It is also the date when reporting seemingly emerged for this incident.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Unknown deepfake technology developer developed an AI system deployed by Brandon Tyler, which harmed Victims of Brandon Tyler and General public.
Alleged implicated AI system: Unknown deepfake technology apps
Incident Stats
Incident ID
1013
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2025-04-04
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
An online pervert who used artificial intelligence (AI) to create deepfake pornography of women he knew has been jailed for five years.
Brandon Tyler, 26, manipulated images from social media pages and posted them in a forum that glorified …
Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.
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