The uploading on Reddit of scarily realistic face celeb porn, apparently generated by one redditter using AI software, has provoked a minor media moral panic this week. In one short gif video, the face of Wonderwoman actress Gal Gadot has been grafted on to the body of a porn actress in a ‘stepsister’ scene. Fake porn with faces crudely Photoshopped onto naked pornstar bodies is s as old as the internet, and likely dates back to the first photo editing software, or perhaps even scissors and photos. However, this appears to be a leap forward, or in the eyes of many observers – particularly celebrities – a dark step backwards. Although the result is not 100% convincing, the AI has produced the face of the celebrity moving in the same way as the actress in the scene. That’s a huge advance, and it will only get more advanced, very quickly.
It’s not going to fool anyone who looks closely. Sometimes the face doesn’t track correctly and there’s an uncanny valley effect at play, but at a glance it seems believable. It’s especially striking considering that it’s allegedly the work of one person—a Redditor who goes by the name ‘deepfakes’—not a big special effects studio that can digitally recreate a young Princess Leia in Rogue One using CGI. Instead, deepfakes uses open-source machine learning tools like TensorFlow, which Google makes freely available to researchers, graduate students, and anyone with an interest in machine learning.
Like the Adobe tool that can make people say anything, and the Face2Face algorithm that can swap a recorded video with real-time face tracking, this new type of fake porn shows that we’re on the verge of living in a world where it’s trivially easy to fabricate believable videos of people doing and saying things they never did. Even having sex.
Speaking to The Verge, Dr. Kate Devlin, an academic specializing in AI and sexuality, suggests there may be some positives that could come out of this tech, including cutting down on exploitative sex work by generating fake porn. But these upsides are easily outweighed by the negatives, she says: “The potential for fake news and revenge porn is just so high, and this technique is so easily done by the looks of things.”
Devlin also notes that as opposed to other ethical challenges created by AI (such as problem of bias in algorithms), this sort of threat is much harder to police. These are not technologies distributed by centralized corporations — they’re open-source and can be used by anyone with the right know-how. “This is easily accessible so it’s really hard to put it back in the bottle,” she says.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gydydm/gal-gadot-fake-ai-porn
Now that ‘revenge porn’ laws are already in place in many countries, it’s hard not to foresee them being used, and if necessary widened, to regulate this kind of sex tech. However, the question will arise as to how far we want the state to intrude in people’s private lives in order to stop the inevitable march of this kind of sex tech progress. ‘Revenge porn’ involves ex-boyfriends posting nude or pornographic pics of their former lovers to the internet, in order to embarrass them. What about a boyfriend using AI to create a sex video that appears to feature his ex? This would one assumes be covered by revenge porn laws, but what if he doesn’t post it online but simply uses it for his own gratification? Should the average Joe be allowed to use this technology to create sex fantasies involving famous celebs, or perhaps just his neighbour’s wife, or his college crush? The problem, if it is one, will only get more acute as this AI tech is incorporated into VR and AR porn. The demand will surely be there. As one cheeky commentator underneath the Verge article puts it : ‘Bring on the VR celebrity harems. Thank you!‘
