An AI-Powered App Has Resulted in an Explosion of Convincing Face-Swap Porn (vice.com)

Samantha Cole, reporting for Motherboard: In December, Motherboard discovered a Redditor named 'deepfakes' quietly enjoying his hobby: Face-swapping celebrity faces onto porn performers' bodies. He made several convincing porn videos of celebrities -- including Gal Gadot, Maisie Williams, and Taylor Swift -- using a machine learning algorithm, his home computer, publicly available videos, and some spare time. Since we first wrote about deepfakes, the practice of producing AI-assisted fake porn has exploded. More people are creating fake celebrity porn using machine learning, and the results have become increasingly convincing. A redditor even created an app specifically designed to allow users without a computer science background to create AI-assisted fake porn. All the tools one needs to make these videos are free, readily available, and accompanied with instructions that walk novices through the process.

Comments

Re:The only downside I see to this ...

[eth1]

... is that people who are procuring illegal (in particular, kiddie) porn could then hide behind the response of "I thought it was fake". If it went the other way though and actually destroyed the child and exploitative porn market then it would be mostly for the better.

It goes a lot deeper than that. For example, now that I know this is so easy to do, if I'm ever on a jury, I can't really consider any video evidence as enough for a criminal conviction, unless it has a documented chain of custody.

Likewise, any video that would normally cause public scandal can be dismissed as, "oh, it's fake!" even if it isn't, which might actually be a net benefit for public figures and those in power.

Re:"free"

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article:

The subreddit’s wiki states that FakeApp is “a community-developed desktop app to run the deepfakes algorithm without installing Python, Tensorflow, etc.,” and that all one needs to run it is a “good GPU [graphics processing unit, the kind that high-end 3D video games require] with CUDA support [NVIDIA’s parallel computing platform and programming model].”

So this now seems independent of TensorFlow.

Re:Oh the Humanity!

[AmiMoJo]

I did some, err, research, for science... And it turns out that you need to find a model who looks kinda like the celebrity and video which doesn't show their face at odd angles it can't cope with for it to work properly.

I can see a new industry starting up, with look-a-like porn stars who produce videos specially shot to suit face replacement.

As well as celebrity lawsuits I expect there will be a lot of blackmail and kids in court for putting a classmates face on some porn.