2023 was the year of the porno deepfake. In that 12-month period alone there was a 1,700 per cent increase in deepfakes detected globally across all industries. In our eternal quest to educate itself about the world, Loaded went deep(ish) undercover – well, we left the house to get milk – to find out what all the fuss is about. We wish we hadn’t.
Remember the good old days of jazz magazines like Escort and Fiesta, MenOnly and Readers’ Wives and, that really fancy one, Swank? Of course you do, it’s all you “read '' in the nineties. We were there. Every now and again those rags would have “celebrity lookalikes' ' of WAGS like Victoria Beckham, and Dame Edna. (That could have been a dream). Well, those innocent-seeming days of knocking one out into a Kleenex while your Mum was out ….are dead. Pornographic deepfakes have turned a 300,000-year-old hobby into a dark and dangerous game, where everyone you know is a possible player.
In the seven short years since The Fappening – the Apple iCloud leak of celebrity nudes, as if you need reminding – the celebrity pornalike is now a leading character in a much more illicit game, the deepfake industry, where more than 96 per cent of deepfakes are non-consensual and sexual, and 99 per cent women. Last year, Sensity AI, the organisation that monitors deepfakes online, found that tens of thousands of celebrities, public figures and millions of everyday people have had deepfakes made of them. Actor Scarlett Johannsson, perhaps the most famous to date, in a “fake leaked” video that has been watched millions of times on a major porn site. Its popularity even prompted a response by Johannsson: “Clearly this doesn’t affect me as much because people assume it’s not actually me in a porno, however demeaning it is. I think the internet is a vast wormhole of darkness that eats itself. There are far more disturbing things on the dark web than this, sadly.”
Johannsson’s right, there are. And those disturbing things are the deepfakes of everyday people. People you may know. Open-Source AI multi-platform software such as FaceSwap, the leading deepfake app (available for free on Apple Store), has the ability to turn girlfriends, ex-girlfriends, and even poor buxom Auntie Carol into a deepfake – should the maker so wish. By using AI algorithms to learn the facial and speech movements of one person from their source material, FaceSwap can then apply those same movements onto another person's face in the target video. Suffice to say, it’s a big fucking problem.
The sharing of deepfake pornography – particularly of non-famous people – has become so prevalent online that, in June 2023, an amendment of the Online Safety Bill was announced to criminalise the sharing of deepfake intimate images online. It remains legal to make them, however. But for how much longer, we have to wonder?
The most famous non-sexual deepfake – unless you’re a big Gary Busey fan – was the ‘Buttered Sausage’ video that went viral in October 2023. Watch above to see how it was done.
A deepfake is created using deep learning techniques, particularly generative adversarial networks (GANs). The term "deepfake" is a combination of "deep learning" and "fake." Deepfakes involve the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to manipulate or create images, audio, and video content that appears genuine but is actually fabricated.
Faking It
As 2024 dawned, deepfakes – becoming increasingly known as "synthetic media" – took a bite out of a few more victims; this time not in the disguise of pornalikes, but scams involving the world's biggest YouTuber, MrBeast, the world’s greatest actor, Tom Hanks, and the world’s biggest pop star – Taylor Swift. The “world’s largest iPhone 15 giveaway” scam involving Mr Beast (real name Jimmy Donaldson) was seen by more than 30 million people, prompting the creator to respond aggressively. "Are social media platforms ready to handle the rise of AI deepfakes? This is a serious problem," he said. Hanks’s deepfake also prompted the actor to respond on Insta. "There's a video out there promoting some dental plan with an AI version of me. I have nothing to do with it." Both scams have now been removed by Meta. "We don't allow this kind of content on our platforms and have removed it,” they said promising to work constantly working on improve deepfake recognition systems.
The most troubling deepfakes to become an overnight global issue of concern was the arrival of the sexually explicit AI-generated deepfake images in late January of Taylor Swift. The posts, one in particular, was viewed more than 47 million times before its eventual removal from leading sites such as 4chan and X. In the 48 hours after the images were posted, internet search engines switched off the search function for the star ahead of the images’ swift removal. Good luck finding them now.
The future is here people – and it looks fucking scary.
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