In a rather controversial opinion piece that appeared in leading British Conservative magazine ‘The Spectator’ last week, the English author and journalist Sam Leith asked the question – ‘Can we fight deepfake porn?’ Early into the article, he pretty much answers his own question.
“Unless I’m missing something, horrid though it may be, deepfake porn is going to be an unavoidable feature of 21st century life.”
The author then goes on to present his case that the genie is out of the bottle, so to speak, as regards AI porn, and that all the signs are that deepfake porn will follow an exponential like trajectory. Therefore, is it even possible that regulation and laws could possibly stop this tidal wave of AI generated content?
Those who make it their business to keep an eye on these things report that in the last five years the number of AI-generated fake nudes in circulation has gone up almost threefold. More AI-generated fake porn videos have already been posted in 2023 alone than in the six years previously.
As the article is behind a paywall, I do not want to quote too much of it here. But that is the essence of Letih’s article. It’s a realistic and sober view of the present truth that an exponentially growing digital technology is being applied to the creation of porn, and it’s going to be very hard, if not impossible, to stop it.
As a fan of Ray Kurzweil, and the notion of ‘The Singularity‘ to which he is associated with, I’ve long argued the case here that as digitization is applied to porn and sex tech, then these two fields will be subject to the law of accelerated returns. For example, when AI generated celebrity porn first started catching people’s attention back in early 2018, I wrote an article in which I opined that the digitization of porn creation could lead to exponential growth that would be difficult to stop.
Digital and AI advances in ‘immersive porn’ are potentially subject to the type of exponential growth made famous by Moore’s Law (which relates to computer processing speed and efficiency). Sex toys, dolls, robots, and even VR porn (because of the physical headsets) can only ever be partly so because of their reliance on large physical mediums or materials. So, for example, advances in sex robots wont happen overnight, although the sophistication of some elements like speech and face recognition might. The physical side of sex robots will still have to undergo an industrial process of manufacturing and design, as well as distribution and marketing.
Fake AI-produced porn, however, is a different matter. Algorithms can be improved constantly by an ever growing community of enthusiasts. The AI software can improve based upon an exponentially increasing amount of data and faces to process, as well as improvements to the AI itself. Allied with the speed of improvements in the software and the numbers using and feeding it, is the range of possibilities and uses for it are also rapidly being expanded by the inventive community of ‘deepfakers’.
I finished the article with a warning that “When a porn technology like this literally explodes overnight, a kneejerk overkill reaction will almost be guaranteed.“. This appears to me to be exactly what is happening around the world right now. There is an awareness that the dam has burst, and that it will be useless to try to stop it in a year or two. Therefore, decisions need to be made right now, and laws enacted immediately. Any nuanced approach, any objective appraisal of what the harms and impact of AI and deepfake porn are, and what a measured legislative response to it should be, is likely to be lost.
Laws that are enacted against deepfake porn now, will make illegal what deepfake porn could be in 10 or 20 years. For example, in another decade, when AR glasses are likely to become mainstream, no doubt couples will be making use of them to spice up their lovemaking. And they could combine augmented reality with deep fake tech to do so. Couples could roleplay as celebrities using real-time deepfake tech. Only they couldn’t because deepfake porn would be illegal (in this case, it would already be illegal in many places as ‘sharing’ of deepfake porn).
Sam Leith’s article is titled ‘Can we fight deepfake porn?’, but it also asks ‘How should we fight deepfake porn?’. He draws a valid (in my opinion) comparison between somebody creating a deepfake image at home, with somebody mentally undressing another person. Of course, unlike a private thought, there is a possibility that an actual AI-generated deepnude could be seen by other people, including the person who has been ‘nudified’. It appears that governments across the world may be willing to pass heavy-handed laws on that basis.
Featured image courtesy of PornJoy NSFW image generator.
