Galway West, Ireland: broadcaster Gráinne Seoige says an AI-generated sexual deepfake image of her circulated on WhatsApp during her 2024 election campaign
Gráinne Seoige, a broadcaster who stood for Fianna Fáil in Galway West in Ireland's 2024 general election, told RTÉ's Prime Time in January 2026 that people close to her alerted her during the campaign to sexualised images of her made with deepfake technology. She says the AI-generated pornographic image was disseminated through WhatsApp, shared hundreds if not thousands of times by her account, and that when gardaí sought its origin some recipients refused to cooperate, so the investigation hit a dead end. She kept silent during the campaign and has described the experience as deeply traumatising, with shame and humiliation lasting almost a year and a half. In a September 2026 interview relayed by RSVP Live from the Sunday Independent she described night terrors of faceless men tearing her clothes off and wearing a long puffer coat everywhere so her body could not be seen. She has since appeared before the Oireachtas media committee (Irish Independent, 21 January 2026), and made a Virgin Media documentary on deepfake abuse, scheduled for broadcast on 5 October 2026. In passages from it quoted by RSVP Live and the Irish Sun on 4 October 2026 she says she was shown the image in September or October 2024, that it made her not want to go outside, that she moved away from her home and that she has had therapy; she also says she believes the image was politically motivated. The Irish Times, reviewing the documentary on 5 October 2026, reports that in it she learns from a Dublin technology company that further images taken from her Instagram account have been manipulated with deepfake software, which was news to her. The tool used to make the image and the person who made it are not identified.
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 7 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 28/09/2026