DEEPFAKE PORN: The Revenge Porn Industry is Going Mainstream
A new study has shown that women are 6% more likely to have their identities stolen than men. Also, 6% of women are more likely than men to have their social media accounts targeted by phishing messages, 5% more likely to have an attacker send messages from a compromised account to their friends and family, and 9% more likely to have their accounts hacked. They are also 3% more likely to experience suspicious online activity.
This is nothing compared to what the study actually found. In fact, what the study stumbled upon was mesmerizing.
Here’s what it says:
“Today’s women are facing a unique threat in the digital world: It’s called ‘revenge porn’!” Women are three times more likely to be the victims of “revenge porn,” also known as “deepfake porn,” than men. Twenty-six percent of those who were surveyed said they have experienced some form of cyberstalking and were threatened with revenge porn, including the creation of “deepfake porn” videos of them.”
Unsurprisingly, 12% of women said they are much more likely to feel unsafe online than men, while almost 60% said they experienced some form of sexual harassment online.
But when it comes to deepfake porn, women’s messages were almost all identical: “It’s
completely horrifying, dehumanizing, and degrading.”
Artificial intelligence has allowed for cheaper and more accessible technology in visual effects, enabling the creation of deepfakes. This is when a person in a video can be replaced by someone else. This technology is now largely used to attack mainly women.
According to cybersecurity company Deeptrace, 96% of all deepfakes online are pornographic, and the top five deepfake pornography websites target women. Today, deepfakes have become a weaponized form of technology used to harm women and girls online.
The owner of one of the internet’s most popular deepfake porn sites told me, on condition of anonymity in an interview on WhatsApp, that his site exclusively posts non-consensual deepfake porn of celebrities. When asked, he denied posting photos or videos of ordinary women or girls. Unsurprisingly, his argument was expected: “I don’t feel guilty about celebrities, they can handle it and they know people fantasize about them.” He bragged that his site gets more than 500,00 visitors per day. But he said he banned videos or photos if he found out they belong to non-celebrities. He said he knows that most of what he was posting on his site was “fake,” and therefore had no feeling of guilt or shame keeping his site online. He contended that it was for entertainment purposes only.
But for the victims of deepfake porn, it’s hardly entertaining!
They’re being sexualized without their consent. For many, such kind of abuse has changed the trajectory of their lives. In some cases, it even robbed them of their career, let alone their image and reputation.
Imagine if these photographs from every chapter of your life were harvested by a stranger who used technology to crop and cut them for a sex collage. Imagine if one day, by total coincidence, you not only see that your face has been plastered all over the internet, but that it has been placed on someone else’s naked body and framed as pornography.
I cannot even fathom the amount of pain this would be causing the victims of deepfake porn, mostly women.
As I was researching the materials for this video, I came across a new deepfake technology that allows users to make people in photographs say whatever you want, in any way you want. I was amazed, even stupefied how this deepfake technology is getting more and more predominant, and more and more sophisticated.
What I’m not sure about is that if this is for the good or for the bad.
SPEAKING PORTRAITS
While conducting my research, I came across a platform called MyHeritage Deep Nostalgia (https://www.myheritage.com/deep-nostalgia). This platform allows users to animate still photos of old, even dead and buried relatives. Using artificial intelligence, it brings motionless people in the photos to life. I could make them move their heads, have them blink their eyes, even smile. Now, I’ve been told that the company is working on a new feature, which is much more sophisticated, called “Speaking Portraits”.
This new feature, it’s been said, allows users to turn still headshots into realistic videos into which users can input their own audio. Basically, what this new feature does is that it can make the people in the photos move and say whatever you want them to say. Regardless of how fake this sounds, yet I found the technology behind it absolutely amazing!
THE GAME OF DARK WEB WHACK-A-MOLE
A few months ago, TikTok released a similar feature to MyHeritage called the Dynamic Photo Filter. It quickly became popular on the app. While browsing through the #dynamicphoto tag on TikTok, I discovered a batch of emotional videos from users using the filter on deceased relatives and loved ones, and filming their reactions.
Despite the progress of MyHeritage Deep Nostalgia, I found that it still has its limitations. For example, you do not have control over the movements in the generated video, and the subject doesn’t speak. Once released, Speaking Portraits is expected to have far more potential.
But what is the point of all this?
Like you, I believed that this article was going to focus solely on deepfake or revenge porn. But the more I delved deep into it, the more I discovered how fake our world is and all the artificial intelligence applications in it.
Today, we live in a world riddled with fake media, damaged by fake news, and inundated by fake porn. Almost everything is fake, and with AI technology becoming more accessible and easier to use, the door is becoming wide open for more misinformation, more deception, and more distortion.
Besides the scary issue with deepfake porn, these new intelligent apps are also dangerously user-friendly. What’s even more frightening is that they’re accessible to almost everyone.
Although it’s been said by many media outlets that these apps exist in “relative obscurity,” for me they weren’t that hard to find, and very simple to use. All I had to do is upload a photo of a face, and the site opens up a library of videos, some of them sex-related, some of them not. But the vast majority I came across featured women, though a small handful also featured men, mostly gay men.
So, in a matter of seconds, I was able to select any video to generate a preview of the face I wanted to swap. And if I wanted to download the full version of the video, all I had to do is to pay for it — all in a matter of seconds.
Although for me the results weren’t that perfect, they were realistic enough for anyone wanting to use those deepfakes to turn any of their victims’ lives upside down and shatter them to the core.
If this is not scary, then what is!
At first, I was unable, with all the frustration that I had, to understand why these apps cannot be pushed offline. But then the sad truth hit me — deepfake porn technology has become so easily accessible that trying to banish it from the dark web has essentially become a “game of whack-a-mole.”
DEEPFAKE PORN IS NOW TARGETING UNDERAGE GIRLS
Remember the saying, “a picture paints a thousand words?” Well, it has just got a whole new meaning with all these new tools that make your picture actually say more than a thousand words. These tools can now add motion and sound to your portraits, so they become realistically talking heads in a creepy way, of course.
I read a number of articles online and spoke to a few tech nerds who referred to this as a step forward in technology. They kept telling me that it’s a different technology than deepfake although both technologies looked the same to me.
Let’s take Speaking Portraits as an example. Once part of the D-ID’s AI Face Platform, it will also include Live Portrait and Face Lit. The first uses a driver video to animate a person in a still photo to precisely match the driver’s head movement, facial expressions, emotions, and voice. As for the second, it’s a tool that changes facial expression in any still image.
Just like deepfake porn, this kind of technology can be used for all kinds of deceptive and harmful purposes: from fake porn to fake political speeches– all you need is a single photo. That’s all you need.
Celebrities and adult women aside, this technology is now said to be targeting underage girls. In some cases, it’s been reported that a deepfake bot is being used to “undress” teenage girls. This first started on DeepNude in 2019 before the app was shut down, then spread freely on Telegram in 2020.
As a result, the scope of abuse has grown. Now, the targets are no longer just celebrities and Instagram influencers, but teenage girls. In the case of Telegram, Sensity found there had been at least 100,000 victims, including underage girls. Newer apps are now providing the perfect tool for some sick person to exert power and control over victims — in some cases helpless teenage girls.
Why isn’t the law banning them?
Deepfake porn app equivalents are popping up almost every day, and it will be a matter of time before people from all walks of life learn how to use and abuse them. Yet, no one is doing anything about it, almost no one.
Till this very moment, the dangers of deepfake porn have been limited. In fact, a new survey has shown that 80% of people still have no clue what a deepfake is. To a certain extent, this sounds like good news.
Unfortunately, it’s not!
The attention on deepfakes and synthetic media has grown enormously in recent months. The technology of swapping women’s clothes for highly realistic nude bodies is now readily available, or perhaps I should say — dangerously accessible.
What’s worse, revenge porn is being used as a powerful tool to silence women. A female journalist in India is said to have had her face grafted onto a porn video after she began uncovering government corruption.
HOW TO BECOME A DEEPFAKE-STYLE MARKETING CLONE?
Deepfakes are the great new threat. And algorithms are making it much easier for far more people to generate ever more convincing fake media.
Politicians say the technology is difficult to regulate, but the tide seems to be turning. Countries, like the UK, are moving forward with the ban on such apps. And if the US takes action, the EU is likely to follow. But the problem with the US is its First Amendment. Vice President Kamala Harris is trying to change that. But who knows if the US will ever succeed in reclaiming power?
Closing one site generates another, and another, and another. They rely on something known as a “Generative Adversarial Network”, or GAN — a type of AI that learns to produce realistic but fake examples. In a recently published paper titled “This Person (Probably) Exists,” researchers show that many faces produced by GANs bear a striking resemblance to actual people who appear in the training data.
To add fuel to flames, people are increasingly and willingly hiring out their faces to become deepfake-style marketing clones. Hence, AI-powered characters based on real people can star in thousands of videos and say anything, in any language. This is allowing AI-synthetic media to move away from the darker corners of the internet. Soon, it will become legit, and all attempts to prevent it will vanish in thin air. Deepfakes are going mainstream, and from what it appears, they seem unstoppable.
Hour One (https://www.hourone.ai/) is one of the companies taking deepfake tech mainstream. The only difference between Hour One and other companies is that it doesn’t ask for any particular skills. You just hand over the rights to your face, and that’s all you need to do to become a deepfake-style marketing clone.
Hour One is building up a pool of what it calls “characters.” It says it has around 100 on its books so far, with more being added each week. Anyone can apply to become a character. Like any modeling agency, Hour One filters through applicants, selecting those it wants on its books. The company is aiming for a broad sample of characters that reflect the ages, genders, and racial backgrounds of people in the real world. Currently, around 80% of its characters are under 50 years old, 70% are female, and 25% are white.
To create a character, Hour One uses a high-resolution 4K camera to film a person talking and making different facial expressions in front of a green screen. And that’s it for the human part of the performance. Plugging the resulting data into AI software that works in a similar way to deepfake tech, and the company can generate an endless amount of footage of that person saying whatever it wants, in any language it wants, in whatever style it wants. The company now has more than 40 clients, from real estate, to e-commerce, digital health, and entertainment.
An earlier version of Hour One is a company in the US called Alice Receptionist (https://www.alicereceptionist.com/). It provides firms with an avatar on a screen to handle visitors’ queries, replacing the role of a human receptionist. Those who hire their faces to any of the two companies receive a micropayment every time a client licenses a video that uses their face.
THE CONCLUSION
In this post-information age, we’re witnessing the dark side of technology. Instead of moving forward, technological progress is providing us with more means and ways to go backward.
The great myth of our times is that technology works. As Pablo Picasso once said: “Computers are useless. They only give you answers.” The same applies to artificial intelligence: It’s a useful servant but a dreadful master.
True, AI may be capable of doing the work of thousands of ordinary people, maybe millions, who will one day become redundant, but it cannot replace the work of one extraordinary person.
Technology, such as deepfake porn results in pain and suffering for the women who have to endure it; yet more companies are working tirelessly to further develop that technology and stay one step ahead of the people trying to use it negatively. The technological advances made by AI, mainly when it comes to deepfake porn, say little about human intelligence but speak volumes about human wickedness.
It has become obvious that today’s technology, especially AI, has exceeded… our humanity!
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