For those of you who aren’t a fan of revenge porn, well buckle up because it’s about to get a whole lot creepier and worse. Samantha Cole at Motherboard wrote an article about the development and rapid public adoption of AI-generated fake porn. Basically, a Redditor named deepfakes had a very active hobby of face swapping celebrities onto porn stars and making it look like those celebs had made salacious sex tapes. A subreddit was formed and more and more users have started sharing their own creations.
One user even developed an app called FakeApp that allows people to much more easily create these convincing face swaps, and—guess what—people are. And some of them are convincing as hell. (We wouldn’t recommend visiting the subreddit at work unless you work at like, an AI Porn office, in which case, go nuts.) Scrolling through the subreddit I saw porns "starring' Kristen Bell, Megan Fox, Jessica Alba, and Natalie Portman.
Cole spoke with a few CGI experts and media analysts who pretty much all agreed—we’re fucked. As the technology gets better and better and gets into the hands of more and more creeps, we’re going to have a harder time discerning what is and isn’t real. Deborah Johnson, Professor Emeritus of Applied Ethics at the University of Virginia’s school of engineering, told Cole, “What is new is the fact that it’s now available to everybody, or will be... It’s destabilizing. The whole business of trust and reliability is undermined by this stuff.”
Some porn sites are even posting these AI fakes as real videos. CelbJihad shared a video of “Emma Watson” “flaunting her naked sex organs while showering with another girl.” If that phrasing has you rolling your eyes you're not alone. It sounds bot-generated, like the clip itself. But...it'll fool a not-insignificant number of people.
People believe what they read. What makes you think they’re able to be more astute with what they are literally watching. It’s just a matter of time until someone makes a (trigger warning: terrible mental image) sex video of Trump and, like, Oprah. There’s enough raw footage of both individuals that it really isn’t that far out of the realm of possibility. And some idiot on the internet will see this “leaked tape” and it’ll confirm all their fears that the two-party system is a longstanding facade covering up the omnipotent illuminati. In this new reality, we might actually be able to see a version of the infamous pee tapes.
The fake porn era will make the fake news one look like the fucking golden age of certitude.
