Summary
William Hamish Yeates, a 20-year-old law student from Adelaide, pleaded guilty to two counts of creating or altering sexual material without consent after doctoring a 17-year-old girl’s Year 12 graduation photo into AI-created sexually explicit images and videos and posting them to the pornographic website Ero Me and to X under multiple accounts during a five-month period. The reporting identifies this as deepfake pornography and says the victim first saw her graduation photo on a pornographic website.
Yeates became the first person in Australia convicted under 2024 federal laws targeting deepfake pornography. He was sentenced to two years and three months’ imprisonment, with the jail term suspended on condition of a three-year $500 good-behaviour bond; the court also ordered payment of the victim’s medical expenses and forfeiture of a seized phone and laptop.