Michael James Doyle: No jail for using AI to alter women’s images to nudes and sharing with friends

A man who avoided immediate jail for possessing hundreds of items of child exploitation material has now avoided a jail cell for using artificial intelligence to strip women naked and distributing the results online. Michael James Doyle used AI on multiple occasions to alter publicly posted photos of women in bikinis and singlets so they appeared naked, and posted the results on his Instagram page or to a private chat with two of his friends. In Kalgoorlie Magistrates Court on Friday, he was sentenced to eight months imprisonment for the four charges of distributing an intimate image of another person without consent, suspended for 12 months. Magistrate Paul Lyons said the suspension period was given by the “barest of margins” and followed a submission from Doyle’s lawyer that he be granted a conditionally suspended imprisonment order to run concurrently with the one handed down in the District Court last year for the possession of more than 1000 CEM images and videos. The prosecution launched an appeal of that District Court sentence, but it was dismissed by the Supreme Court of Appeals. Mr Lyons said imposing a concurrent CSIO would effectively grant Doyle “no punishment” for these offences, which he said was not appropriate as it was separate offending. “By sharing these images that were posted by women who did nothing more than exist in a public space; taking them, altering them in a deeply offensive way and sharing them publicly you committed — I think — very serious offences,” Mr Lyons said. Mr Lyons summarised in court the victim impact statement of one of Doyle’s victims, who was not a stranger to him. That victim chose to share the full statement with the Kalgoorlie Miner. She described the “gut drop feeling” and “uncontrollable emotional distress” when she first discovered the altered images. She said she went down a “dark hole” trying to figure out who was behind such a “sickening” act. The victim said she made the decision to “erase her identity” online in order to “stay safe” after suffering reputational damage as the posts tagged her personal social media account. “The embarrassment of having the photo and the disgusting captions on display for everyone I know to see, at times made me physically sick,” she said. “I also now must live with the fact that at any given time in the future that these images can come back and haunt me. “Photos that I did not take nude. Innocent photos that were stolen and used to make nude. “I will never be able to erase this time from my life and have to live with the sickening feeling and the trauma he has caused me.” Doyle’s lawyer told the court his social media page only had two followers, and the private group chat he shared to also had only two other friends, and he did not intend for the images to reach a large audience. However, Mr Lyons said as soon as Doyle posted the images online he “lost control” of them and they could have been distributed further, although there was no evidence provided to the court of that. The lawyer also submitted the same mitigatory factors, including Doyle’s mental deficiencies, which had been relied upon in the District Court, also reduced his moral culpability for this offending. Mr Lyons agreed Doyle had significant mitigation and had made inroads to rehabilitation. However, he said he was not bound by the Supreme Court of Appeals’ findings in its dismissal of the appeal of the District Court sentence, and it was up to him to decide how Doyle’s personal factors weighed upon his sentence in Magistrates Court. He ordered Doyle’s sentence to run in addition to the 18-month jail term, suspended for two years, he was handed in the District Court, but with no extra conditions.