The deepfake age is upon us and with it, a deep desecration through its weapon of choice: the human face.

AI-generated, sexually explicit images of (most often) women, using their own faces, can readily be made and shared, as a high school community in Sydney’s north apparently discovered recently, and as NRL presenter Tiffany Salmond has gone public about experiencing repeatedly this year.

Recently, Salmond courageously shared (censored) deepfake images to her own Instagram account to educate people about the harm they cause. But in one example, she took the extra step of blacking out her face.

“They used AI to fake my body, but it was the face that felt most violating,” she said. “It was still recognisably mine, but twisted. Almost demonic. There’s something even more disturbing in that than even the nudity.”

In that description, Salmond uses far stronger language than “dehumanisation” and “degradation”, or the more neutral terms used by victims and advocates to describe the effects of image-based abuse. Those words capture much, but not enough. They’re what we say when we don’t know what else to say. Our humanness is mostly indescribable, a mystery to ourselves. But that secret self, the soul, is exactly what deepfakes assault.

So, here’s another term to add to the lexicon of deepfake harm: desecration, or the fouling of what’s sacred.

Describing deepfakes as “desecrating” won’t reliably resonate in a secular age. Not much is revered in our time, and mostly that works for us just fine. But as one of my favourite podcasts claims, everyone has core values or deep commitments they consider to be sacred: we can tell by the outrage and deep wounding we feel when our highest commitments are betrayed. It’s just that we often only discover our sacred values when they’re transgressed.

What deepfakes reveal is the sacred significance of the face. We instinctively get this: witness Salmond’s intuition that faking her face feels the “most violating”.

Other victims, like British TV presenter Cathy Newman, have also used similar language. “It feels like a violation,” Newman said last year, upon discovering pornographic deepfake images of her and 4000 other celebrities circulating on the internet without their consent or knowledge – the result of a Channel 4 news investigation. “It just feels really sinister that someone out there who’s put this together, I can’t see them, and they can see this kind of imaginary version of me, this fake version of me.”

This fake version of me. Newman’s shock, and no doubt Salmond’s, stems from the alienation they feel between themselves and their deepfake doubles.

No one may be physically hurt in having their face digitally scraped and superimposed onto someone else. But the harm involved is more like having your name smeared. Aside from any reputational damage (which may be considerable), you feel estranged from yourself. What was yours can’t help feeling soiled. This the unique violence of having your own name, your own face, turned against yourself.

We rarely consider what it means to have a face, be a face. But we should, especially since our faces are far more than they seem at face value. They’re more than passports to prove our identity, unlock our phones, allow us to cross international borders. More than the subject of pouting selfies or LinkedIn profile pics, and still more than the thing we’re told needs “work” to make youthfully plump again.

Faces are our humanity hiding in plain sight. If eyes are the windows to the soul, the face is that soul’s signature, the place of our personal presence.

There’s more. A Jewish proverb holds that each of us is a world unto ourselves, which makes the face something quite cosmic, a doorway into other worlds. If you are an entire world, and so am I, we make or break human worlds every time we encounter each other.

“When a child walks into the room, does your face light up and show them you’re glad to see them?” Toni Morrison once observed, describing parenting as less about ensuring children are neat and orderly, and more about taking the time to whole-heartedly delight in your kids. “Let your face speak what’s in your heart.”

And faces speak volumes. Our faces screw up, close up, wince, glower, and brighten. An ankle or ear can’t seem sad – only a face can. We hide our faces from each other in shame, reject each other by turning our faces away. The faintest, most fleeting, expression suggests a vast hinterland of feeling. This strange surface we share is far more than surface appearances.

For some thinkers, the face of the other is vulnerable, yet exerts moral force upon us. The face is a call to responsibility and a summons to de-centre ourselves and step outside our chronic self-interestedness. “The word of God in the face”, declared the late philosopher Emanuel Levinas, is “an appeal to me, an order for me to be at the service of this face.”

Tread lightly, then, before the face of the other. You are upon sacred ground.

Perhaps this sense of obligation to others explains why the human face happens to be one of our last remaining links to a collective sense of the sacred. The face puts a face, quite literally, on our belief in the otherwise more abstract idea of “human rights”. Apart from anything else, the face is our embodied insistence that we’re more than just meat.

Deepfakes, and those who generate them, desecrate all this. Their dirty business is to take people’s faces – that make visible the deep self and soul – and treat them as though they were faceless, as if they were a thing to be used and discarded. This is an act of spiritual violence. You can murder the soul but, on the body, leave not a mark.

If nothing else, the sacred is a way of seeing – one tuned into spiritual realities beyond our material existence, and one that I think best explains the horror and dismay that deepfakes provoke in us.

Obviously, people don’t need to be religious to feel deeply offended by deepfakes, or distraught at the pain they cause their victims. But listen closely to our outrage. We might hear our submerged sense of the sacred talking.

After all, we have faces – we are faces – and never stop to think about it. Also true: people may not suspect they have a soul – they are a soul – until they see it sullied.

• Dr Justine Toh is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity. She has a PhD in Cultural Studies from Macquarie University.
• The image was AI-generated. It includes a fake image of a dog.
• This article was first published in Eureka Street. Republished with permission of Public Christianity.