She Made a Fake Nude of Herself in Under Five Minutes. Then She Held It Up in Parliament.

Laura McClure did not get naked. She Googled it.

The ACT Party list MP typed "deepfake nude" into a search bar, clicked the first result — a blog ranking the top 60 sites that could do this without an account — and uploaded a headshot. Under five minutes later she had roughly ten images of herself, several placed convincingly inside a bathroom, a kitchen, a bedroom. "You would not be able to tell," she says, "unless you had physically seen me naked before."

Then she blurred one, printed it, and held it up in the New Zealand Parliament.

Why do it to yourself

McClure had been drafting a member's bill after principals and parents started coming to her with what was happening at school: real students' faces stitched onto fabricated sexual images, circulating on group chats and AirDropped between phones on the school bus. New Zealand's law already covered the non-consensual sharing of a real intimate image — the so-called revenge-porn provisions. It said nothing about a synthetic one built to look exactly like you.

A member's bill in New Zealand doesn't get debated on merit. It goes into an actual biscuit tin, gets a number, and waits to be drawn at random on a sitting Wednesday. McClure's bill could sit in that tin indefinitely, unseen. So she manufactured the moment that would get it looked at anyway: she became the demonstration.

"Quite a lot of them can be, 'you're attention-seeking.' I mean, actually, yep — I want attention for this issue."

She knew what it would cost her personally. Holding up a fake nude of yourself in the national legislature is not a comfortable career move for anyone, let alone an elected official whose face is now permanently searchable next to the word "nude." "That's deeply uncomfortable," she says, "and not a great thing to have to do in Parliament."

It went viral before her own country noticed

The timing was almost comic: McClure's stunt landed during New Zealand's budget week, when every domestic political journalist was chasing the finance minister instead. So the story broke first in the UK, then India, then across the EU, before it properly registered at home. By the time local coverage caught up, she was already fielding international interview requests and, in her DMs, a stream of messages from men asking to see the fake image itself. "Can I have a look at the Tumblr," was one she quotes almost bemusedly.

Alongside the ridicule came something heavier: a flood of messages from people the bill was actually for — parents, partners, teenagers — telling her a version of this had already happened to them, and that until they saw her hold up that photo, they had no idea who to tell.

Go after the person, not the app

McClure's bill doesn't touch the technology. It extends the existing non-consent framework to cover a synthetic image built to someone's exact likeness — meaning the crime is making or sharing it without consent, not the tool used to make it. She's explicit about why: New Zealand is a small country with no jurisdiction over servers hosted overseas, and banning one app just pushes users to the next one. "It's not the AI's fault that it is able to do all of these incredible things," she says. "It's the people that are using the AI in the wrong kind of way."

It's a notable position for a libertarian, pro-deregulation MP whose party's entire platform is built on getting government out of the way of technology and business. McClure doesn't see a contradiction — she sees the alternative as worse: overregulating the tools chills the legitimate uses (the AI tutor, the automated farm sensor) without stopping the harm, which simply migrates to the next unregulated site.

The number the bill doesn't talk about

McClure mentions, almost in passing, a 13-year-old girl in New Zealand who attempted suicide after a deepfake was made of her at school. She survived. McClure's line about it is blunt: she isn't willing to find out how many more cases it takes before a bill like hers stops being optional. Her bill is still, as of this recording, a number in a biscuit tin — not yet law. But the argument she built her whole demonstration around is simple enough that no party in Parliament has been willing to say it out loud in public: if it's illegal to share a real photo of someone without consent, it should be illegal to fabricate one to their exact likeness and share that instead. The technology that makes the fake doesn't need new rules. The person who makes it does.