Reddit is no longer tolerating the bizarre Deepfakes trend that shaped up on its platform: the company has banned the controversial forum that churned out heaps of fake celebrity porn entirely generated by an AI.
In addition to the main Deepfakes subreddit which attracted more than 90,000 subscribers, the “front page of the internet” has also banned its NSFW sibling – Deepfakes_NSFW – which focused specifically on smut montages. Both subreddits were closed on February 7.
“This community has been banned,” reads a message on both forums. “This subreddit was banned due to a violation of our content polict, specifically our policy against involuntary pornography,” it continues, linking to the website’s content policy.
Given that Deepfakes swiftly became a heated point of debate around the web, it is hardly surprising that Reddit has opted to shutter the bizarre community.
While the banned subreddits ultimately produced a slew of quirky Nicolas Cage memes, splicing the the faces of real people into XXX-rated footage made this trend especially troubling.
Indeed, popular GIF-hosting service Gfycat took the initiative to purge such content from its platform a week ago. There were also reports that some Reddit threads containing AI-generated porn also disappeared from the platform.
Several days later, Twitter and Pornhub similarly followed this lead and promised to wipe all fake celebrity porn from their websites too.
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