{"id":247771,"date":"2026-01-16T11:48:06","date_gmt":"2026-01-16T11:48:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/247771\/"},"modified":"2026-01-16T11:48:06","modified_gmt":"2026-01-16T11:48:06","slug":"ucc-launches-toolkit-to-combat-ai-deepfake-engagement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/247771\/","title":{"rendered":"UCC launches toolkit to combat AI deepfake engagement"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Researchers at University College Cork (UCC) have developed a new online educational toolkit designed to reduce engagement with AI-generated explicit images.<\/p>\n<p>The free 10-minute intervention, Deepfakes\/Real Harms, is aimed at lowering users willingness to engage with harmful deepfake technology, including non-consensual explicit content.<\/p>\n<p>The online course includes examples of deepfake images and videos, descriptions of the impact of abuse imagery, as well as questions to users about their views of these impacts.<\/p>\n<p>It is designed to encourages reflection and empathy with victims of AI imagery abuse.<\/p>\n<p>UCC researchers said they found that completing the intervention significantly reduced belief in common deepfake myths and lowered users intentions to engage with harmful uses of deepfake technology.<\/p>\n<p>The online tool has been tested with more than 2,000 international participants of varied ages, genders, and levels of digital literacy.<\/p>\n<p>Lead researcher at UCC School of Applied Psychology John Twomey said there is a tendency to attribute human characteristics to AI technology such as blaming Grok for creating explicit images and even running headlines claiming Grok &#8220;apologised&#8221; afterwards.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;But human users are the ones deciding to harass and defame people in this manner,&#8221; Mr Twomey said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Our findings suggest that educating individuals about the harms of AI identity manipulation can help to stop this problem at source,&#8221; he added.<\/p>\n<p>Dr Gillian Murphy, UCC&#8217;s School of Applied Psychology and research project Principal Investigator, said the new toolkit does not relieve platforms and regulators of their responsibilities in tackling abuse, but can be part of a multi-pronged approach.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;All of us &#8211; internet users, parents, teachers, friends and bystanders &#8211; can benefit from a more empathetic understanding of non-consensual synthetic imagery,&#8221; Dr Murphy said.<\/p>\n<p>The project is funded by Lero, the Research Ireland Centre for Software.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Researchers at University College Cork (UCC) have developed a new online educational toolkit designed to reduce engagement with&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":247772,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-247771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247771"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247771\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/247772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}