Deepfake Porn: When Tech Ruins Women’s Lives
Deepfake is a terrifying sexual harassment weapon
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You’re probably familiar with apps like Photo Lab. You hop in, upload a selfie, then wait a few seconds only to find yourself marveling at what you’d look like in a comic book or an ancient painting.
Now picture a similar app but instead of a cute portrait, you get a porn clip with you as one of the actors. The tagline? “Turn anyone into a porn star with one click!”
Oh come on, you might think. Cut the scary far-fetched dystopian bullshit. Except, there’s zero bullshit involved. MIT Technology Review recently reported that such an app exists. They called it “Y” to avoid unintended advertising.
“Y is incredibly easy to use. Once a user uploads a photo of a face, the site opens up a library of porn videos. The vast majority feature women,” MIT wrote. “A user can then select any video to generate a preview of the face-swapped result within seconds — and pay to download the full version.”
The technology behind Y is called Deepfake and as MIT put it: “From the beginning, [this tech has] primarily been used to create pornographic representations of women, who often find this psychologically devastating.”
Wait, what exactly is Deepfake?
It’s a technology that relies on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to fabricate content based on real samples. The term was coined in 2017 by a member of Reddit as the combination of “Deep Learning” and “Fake.”
Deep Learning is a software technology that makes decisions and produces results based on past experience — somewhat like a human brain but specialized in one specific task. For instance, Tesla’s software uses navigation data from the entire fleet to improve its self-driving feature.
Deepfake, on the other hand, uses Deep Learning to produce progressively realistic content that involves face swaps and voice replications. Yes, they can even steal your voice. Here’s how a guy from TikTok deepfaked Tom Cruise.
