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Imagine being sent a porn video starring none other than you?
Only, you’ve never been a porn star and you’ve never recorded an X-rated video.
Photoshop and filters have long exposed pictures to easy manipulation. However to our unpleasant surprise, videos have also now become just as vulnerable to fakes that look real.
Due to widely accessible artificial-intelligence software and DIY tutorials on YouTube, computer-generated porn videos multiply quickly across the web. And much like fake news, it can be difficult to distinguish the fake from the real.
'Deep fakes' are Al-generated pornographic videos that use pictures of ordinary women and celebrities.
Culprits source these pictures from social media and do a convincing face swap and the ‘creators’ of these videos graft a woman’s picture onto someone else’s body without their knowledge or consent.
Their video titles normally read something along the lines of, “leaked sex video of so and so”.
Actress Scarlett Johansson is the latest victim of these disturbing videos, with her face grafted on numerous pornographic scenes. One of those videos has over 1.5 million views according to The Washington Post.
Talking about the ordeal, Scarlett says she tried to fight but it has proven futile. “I think it’s a useless pursuit, legally, mostly because the internet is a vast wormhole of darkness that eats itself,” she said.
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And that is what’s most horrific, that there’s not much legal recourse. In simple terms, we are all vulnerable to this destructive internet trend.
“Nothing can stop someone from cutting and pasting my image or anyone else’s onto a different body,” she explained.
Responding to the growing plight, Twitter says they are banning any non-consensual content, stating that this new trend is against their terms of use.
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The only hope to fighting computer-generated fake-porn videos are the technical experts and online trackers, who say they are working on developing tools that will automatically spot these 'deep fakes'.
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