HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

Essex Man Sentenced to Five Years in Prison for Having Generated and Shared Deepfake Pornography of at Least 20 Women and a Minor

April 4, 2025

Brandon Tyler, an Essex resident, was sentenced to five years in prison for generating and sharing explicit deepfakes of at least 20 women and a minor. This incident, occurring between March 2023 and May 2024, involved manipulating their social media photos, sharing them on online platforms promoting sexual violence, and distributing their personal details. The prosecution under UK's criminal law against sexually explicit deepfakes highlights the importance of safe and secure AI practices in preventing such harm. For those interested in shaping trustworthy AI governance through Project Cerebellum, join us by contributing to our AI incident database and helping establish guardrails for AI.

This case demonstrates the need for Project Cerebellum's HISPI TAIM (Govern) function, which focuses on establishing responsible AI practices to prevent incidents like this. Learn more about joining at JOIN US.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

Alleged deployer
brandon-tyler
Alleged developer
unknown-deepfake-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
victims-of-brandon-tyler, general-public

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1013

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.