Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recounts horror of seeing herself in ‘deepfake porn’

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has described her horror at discovering – midway through a discussion with aides during a car journey in February – that she had been transposed into a “deepfake porn” simulation generated by artificial intelligence and posted on X.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, the progressive congresswoman said the experience of coming up close to a depiction of herself performing a sex act had shown her that being deepfaked was “not as imaginary as people want to make it seem”.

The Democratic US House member added that the mental picture of her deepfake version performing sexual acts stayed with her the rest of the day.

“There’s a shock to seeing images of yourself that someone could think are real,” Ocasio-Cortez told Rolling Stone. “As a survivor of physical sexual assault, it adds a level of dysregulation. It resurfaces trauma, while I’m … in the middle of a fucking meeting.”

A recent Guardian podcast investigation – The hunt for ClothOff: The deepfake porn app – attempted to find out who is behind the deepfake porn explosion, which has recently hit dozens of well-known figures, including Taylor Swift.

A survey of five deepfake porn sites by Britain’s Channel 4 News analysis found 4,000 famous individuals listed.

Ocasio-Cortez told Rolling Stone that “digitizing violent humiliation” is akin to physical rape, and she predicted that “people are going to kill themselves over this”.

She continued: “There are certain images that don’t leave a person, they can’t leave a person,” she said, citing research into problems the human brain has in separating real from fake – even when material is understood to be fake.

“It’s not as imaginary as people want to make it seem,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “It has real, real