About six weeks ago we shared with you a Motherboard report about Redditors getting their jollies off to fake celebrity porn created by artificial intelligence.
It started with a rather small community of redditors using a face swap algorithm that trained AI to match the expressions of pornstars with your favorite celebrity likeness. By attempting to match specific facial queues from training material (usually freely available images or video of celebrities) to source material (porn, mostly) the AI could create a believable representation of your favorite celebrities starring in ad hoc pornography.
At the time, we saw believable but not-quite-convincing representations of celebrities like Gal Gadot, Maisie Williams, and Emma Watson. But that was then.
In six weeks, we’ve seen the addition of numerous celebrities, a community that’s swollen to 15,000 members, and additional scripts and add-ons that make the process of creating fake celebrity porn even easier. To say it has gotten worse might be putting it lightly.
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Created by Reddit user “deepfakes,” the algorithm was always troubling but using it presented enough technical challenges to keep it outside the reach of most amateur perverts. Since our last writing, that’s no longer the case. Now there’s an app, FakeApp, that has essentially lowered the barrier to entry to the point the technology is usable by anyone that can install the application and feed it training material.
Reddit user “deepfakeapp,” who isn’t connected to the algorithm’s original creator told Motherboard:
I think the current version of the app is a good start, but I hope to streamline it even more in the coming days and weeks. Eventually, I want to improve it to the point where prospective users can simply select a video on their computer, download a neural network correlated to a certain face from a publicly available library, and swap the video with a different face with the press of one button.
The Reddit community is using their newfound creative freedom to create not just pornography featuring your favorite celebrities, but this convincing fake of Argentine President Mauricio Macri, combined with footage of Adolph Hitler. Or, there’s Ines Arrimadas, a member of Catalonia’s parliament overlaid onto a porn video from Twistys.
Many have even begun dabbling in VR porn creation using the same techniques.
Face swap algorithms like this are still in their infancy. While the gifs are semi-believable at a glance, it’s not long before the same technology is being used to create — for lack of a better word — revenge porn featuring your spouse, your parents, or even your children.
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