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Reddit Bans 'Deepfakes' AI Porn Communities (theverge.com)
Reddit has banned the r/deepfakes subreddit that's devoted to making AI-powered porn using celebrities' faces, classifying it as a form of "involuntary pornography." Reddit follows several other platforms that have already banned deepfakes pornography, including Pornhub, which said yesterday that deepfakes imagery counted as nonconsensual pornography. The Verge reports: In a post today, Reddit announced an update to its rules on posting sexual imagery of a person without their consent. The new rule extends a ban on posting photos or video of people who are nude or engaged in sexual acts without the subject's permission, saying that this includes "depictions that have been faked" -- including the sophisticated face-swapped videos that have become especially popular on Reddit over the past month. "Do not post images or video of another person for the specific purpose of faking explicit content or soliciting 'lookalike' pornography."
This doesn't affect all AI-based face swapping enthusiasts on Reddit. The subreddit for FakeApp, a program that allows anyone to swap faces in videos, is still online. So is r/SFWdeepfakes, which is devoted to non-pornographic use of the technology. At least one small, specific subreddit devoted to simulated porn for an individual actor also seems to have slipped under the radar. But along with the central deepfakes hub, the main subreddit for posting not-safe-for-work deepfakes has gotten shut down, and so has the community r/YouTubefakes. The subreddit r/CelebFakes, which focused on non-AI-powered photoshopped pornographic images, was initially left online, but removed shortly after the announcement. The site will rely on "first-party reports" to shut down future deepfakes material.
This doesn't affect all AI-based face swapping enthusiasts on Reddit. The subreddit for FakeApp, a program that allows anyone to swap faces in videos, is still online. So is r/SFWdeepfakes, which is devoted to non-pornographic use of the technology. At least one small, specific subreddit devoted to simulated porn for an individual actor also seems to have slipped under the radar. But along with the central deepfakes hub, the main subreddit for posting not-safe-for-work deepfakes has gotten shut down, and so has the community r/YouTubefakes. The subreddit r/CelebFakes, which focused on non-AI-powered photoshopped pornographic images, was initially left online, but removed shortly after the announcement. The site will rely on "first-party reports" to shut down future deepfakes material.
Doesn't look so bad anymore eh?
This whole idea of pasting someone else's face into a porn video would be great for pairing our elected representatives with whichever execs or lobbyists they're currently in bed with.
I expect that 20 to 30 years from now we will be able to sit down at our home entertainment system and have any kind of movie or show we'd like to see custom created for us on the fly with whatever characters and storyline that it senses we want. It will monitor our reactions and do things like always surprising us at the exact moment we least expect it because it knew we had relaxed. It will be in AR or VR and nearly indistinguishable from real life.
Having to make characters that don't look like any one of the billions of people on this planet would really kill the value of these systems. People need to get over it. Imagination augmentation should be no more controlled than imagination itself.
I guess alien porn will become a leading industry - at least until the aliens complain.
For a minute there, I thought people were thinking about the children!
Carry on, then o/
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
First link is broken. Let me help you with that
This really gets to a basic question of who owns the rights to your likeness, your face, your identity and so on. If no one owns their appearance, then these so called deep fakes are free speech and can't be blacklisted. However, if each person owns their likeness and has a say on what can be done with it, then it is truly a form of identity theft and should be not only banned by Redit, but treated as a crime.
On the flip side, now when a celebrity sex tape or some other revealing personal content gets dropped on the web, the actor/actress can now claim it is just an AI deep fake.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
I realize that it will be banned on some sites, but just like a few popular memes, a simple google search will find deep fakes of Nick Cage and more all over the internet.
I think that at some point, we're going to have to come to terms with the technology and to deal with things that are far more important than border walls and stupid dictators.
Just add {In Space!} to anything.
"involuntary pornography"
This is complete bullshit.
Have a think about what exactly is being censored here. You cannot control my thoughts. You cannot punish me for committing a victim-less crime in my own home.
Oh, you think these videos hurt the feelings of the actors whose likeness is being manipulated? There are a million things I could do or say that would hurt their feelings and not a single one of them should be prohibited.
Just stop and think for a moment, damn.
https://voat.co/v/DeepFake
In most of the world, you have the right to control your own image. Someone can't create a likeness of you and distribute it without your permission. That's why reality shows blur out the faces of people walking around in the background.
If someone using this app got the celebrity's written permission before pasting their face onto a porn star's (and permission of the original movie copyright holder), I'm sure Reddit wouldn't have a problem with it. But likely all of this is being done and distributed without the consent of the people whose faces are being used. That makes it a huge liability for Reddit to allow its distribution via their site, and they're wisely taking steps to keep themselves from being sued into oblivion in what are pretty clearly open and shut cases..
The future you cite can still happen. But the actor you pick for your customizable movie has to have given consent before their likeness can legally be used in the movie. And you can still do it as much as you like and to anyone whom you wish in the privacy of your own home. You just can't distribute it.
Banning pornography that's involuntary / nonconsensual. Ok great, makes total sense... when the subject is actually in the video. Upskirts, hidden cam, that stuff is evil and needs to die. But when the video is explicitly faked, that's NOT nonconsensual. It's aconsensual. Consent isn't an issue because THE PERSON WASN'T INVOLVED!!
How is deepfakes any different from parody porn? You have porn actors / actresses playing famous people all the time. Sarah Palin, Trump, Obama, there's tons of porn featuring people pretending to be them. The resemblance to the real Sarah Palin is uncanny. Yet no one complains about those. Why? BECAUSE CONSENT ISN'T AN ISSUE WHEN YOU AREN'T PART OF IT!!!
People need to get over themselves and stop trying to control every possible use of their image. It's a fools errand that accomplishes nothing. What's next - criminal penalties for daydreaming about someone famous?
Deepfakes is actually good for society. Revenge porn ceases to be a thing when everyone has plausible deniability. "Oh that's not me - it's a fake."
I say all this having never watched a deepfakes video. I have no interest in them. Leave the sex work to professional porn stars. Give the real porn actor/actress the credit they deserve instead of grafting on someone else's face.
And I was shocked that Reddit hadn't done the same thing first. Anybody on those subreddits who didn't see this coming from a mile away is a moron.
It's as if billions of voices cried out and were suddenly silenced.
is because Wired, the verge, and others have started writing stories about it, and Reddit doesn't need more "vile shit happens here" news.
Participants got very upset in early virtual worlds (e.g. LambdaMOO) when their avatars
were manipulated by others to do objectionable things, resulting in "virtual rape".
Quite a lot of philosophical, emotional, and legal discussion on that.
And those avatars were merely online identities that were mere text: made up character
names ("handles") that had no link to their users, who were fairly speaking, anonymous.
And the "rape" consisted of spoofing text (these were pure text systems, no graphics).
now that people will be able to do similar things to actual real people's own images,
in a manner indistinguishable from watching real life video, the implications have
far more impact and will be universally understood to be very serious.
There will "soon" be laws that make it both criminal and tortuous to create,
distribute, and possess these kinds of false images, with additional laws
regarding intent to harm. These will be modern adjuncts to the existing
laws about defamation, invasion of privacy, identity theft, and so on.
Evidentiary standards will have to be adjusted.
It will only be legal to do it when a special consent form is properly executed.
The free speech protections of "famous people", "parody", and perhaps
even the idea of "for private viewing only" will not be applicable in this regime.
That won't stop a lot of people from doing it anyway.
And since any child will also be able to do it, and they are incapable
of understanding what they are doing, giving or understanding consent,
or any consequences, it's going to get very messy.
This has all been on the horizon for a while now, and the main idea
must go back to when photographs and movies were first invented.
The one thing that is certain is that human psychology will not change,
and people will feel violated when this happens. People and society
are not going to change and wake up one day saying, "Oh, well,
those are just pictures, and we all know pictures lie, so no biggie!"
Because our fundamental biology demands that what we see
is NOT a lie, even when we accept that a little bit of it must be.
But images of people generally, and most especially ourselves?
Those never lie, except in a very specific psychological context
called "fantasty". And people own their likeness, and don't want
their soul stolen by someone else. It's human nature.
The information has never been "free", and you can only fap to approved footage that someone has paid for.
Some guy using the force command to 'mud rape' women. A real shitbag.
Still runs a MUD today, has a wife and kids, but unrepentant.
I think a pretty good First Amendment case could be made for a "Deepfakes" porno of a chubby old gay man with Trump's face being enthusiastically backscuttled by a hugely hung dude wearing Putin's face. Call it satire, call it comedy, call it fair comment. It doesn't matter. Even done perfectly, nobody would believe it was real, so it would be hard to argue that either Trump or Putin would suffer the kind of opprobrium associated with a porn video intended to deceive people into believing such an event actually took place.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
Old school is best school.
To be, as a newbie, at first glance, this looks like a site, interested in breaking the groupthink and circle-jerk that is emerging from and inherent in the concept of upvoting, on sites like Reddit. At least the buttons title "subversive" on the right tell me that. That sounds very nice.
At second glance, I see loads of people posting racist shit about "kikes" and old Nazi depictions of Jews, etc. And even though as a half-German, I have seen both sides of this, with Jews being one of the groups suffering in WWII, and Jews themselves becoming the Nazis in Israel (making their grandparents turn in their graves [which is why Germany will soon run purely on renewable power ;]), I ended up not wanting anyone to hate anyone, full stop. So I obviously think this is not very nice, nor very smart.
And at third glance, I remember reading the Snowden leaks, about how various TLAs approach anything they deem "subversive", no matter if good or bad for the American people: By injecting moles, to divide the group via infighting, and to act as agents provocateurs, doing stupid and evil shit that make the group look bad, attracting bad people into the group, and making good people from the group do bad things, ... all in order to discredit them so the media can come down on them and finish them off.
There were, I think, 43 organizations listed in the leaks, that had this done to them... in a single year. Among them were Occupy, Wikileaks (partial "success"), and even the Tea Party. (Which made me re-think my view about all of them, and look up how they originally started out. Most of the groups that were attacked that way, were not originally bad.)
So of course, looking at how those agencies have such a high budget that they don't even know what to spend all of it on, and knowing that they have huge numbers of Internet trolls (yes, just like Russia, except an order of magnitude bigger... but less effective per person, due to having the luxury of being able to be wasteful), I must allow the possibility, that those assholes on voat.co might just be such trolls, trying to ruin the site.
Then again, they might also not be.
Fuck, not being able to ever know, really sucks.
Not having a site that isn't obedient goose-stepping circle-jerking groupthink, sucks nearly as much.
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You're forgetting, that in Catholiban 'Murica, as soon as it even has a hint of sexual theming, everyone has a socially conditioned knee-jerk reaction to go batshit insane. Because the morals regarding sexuality and nudity are not based on rational sane logic (otherwise casual public nudity or even masturbation would be as normal as casual public ... food or eating ... since the actual harm done in reality is also precisely zero), but on the perspective of religious schizophrenics with a fucked-up sexuality, who are always prone to raping children or strapping on bomb vests etc, and simply assume that everyone else is just as fucked-up as them, and hence must have fucked-up thoughts too.
In most of the world, you have the right to control your own image.
And in the US (which is the jurisdiction which applies where REddit is based), these rights specifically control *commercial exploitation*
(i.e.: a company deciding to sell products and earn money by using your face on them without your consent).
It absolutely doesn't cover stuff like horny teenagers using pencils to make their fantasy happen on hand-drawn comics.
That sweaty 14 y.o. drooling why drawing a sex act involving Kate Perry ? Perfectly legal.
(Well, until he decides to show it to his friends, then in the US it becomes a matter of under-age access to porn).
DeepFake is basically just a better pen enabling horny boys to draw their fantasies - THAT NEVER happened in the real world.
Criticizing to output of deep fake isn't anymore illegitimate than criticizing a caricature, etc.
It's artists rendition of something imaginary that happens to look like a living person.
It's not actually stealing the collection of nude selfie of someone.
It's drawing your own imaginary representation of what it would like (but using a better computer rather than a pencil or old-school Photoshop).
As long as it's not mis-represented (i.e.: the doctored movie being clearly stated as such, with credits where it is due to the original material that was used in the remix. Not pretending that Scarlett Johanson actually took part in hardcore BDSM session with you - that probably goes into on slander/libel territory), I fail to see what's the problem.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I never knew I was fucked up. I don't want to see tits, ass, or masturbation in public. Well this really bothers me, my fucked-up-ed-ness. If I can't find an 8 year boy right now, I'm going to have to find me a suicide belt.
Thank you for letting me know how fucked up, _I_ am.
Deepfaked porn of celebrities' faces presents a serious harassment. However, I suggest this pales into insignificance when compared to a vastly bigger threat: evidence fabrication. A face swap pic can be enough to destroy careers, even put innocent people into prison.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...