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.

Comments

Setting a bad precedent

[RhettLivingston]

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.

Re: "involuntary pornography"

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you feel about having your likeness merged with some child porn?

Re:Precedent on this was set decades ago

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

That explains all those piracy reddits they shut down. And the neo-nazi ones. And the various fappening shit that took them ages to shut down. Oh, right, that's it, isn't it? They bowed to Hollywood because they got legal threats up the wazoo, so now they're preemptively caving because the publicity is dragging their "good name" through the mud.

The real stupidity is that reddit isn't "distributing" the content or otherwise hosting it. They're a news aggregator providing links. That's been the MO for a lot of sites to justify their behavior. Preemptively taking down a whole subreddit--I guess it might not be preemptive if they already got C&Ds--just reeks of the point that reddit is no longer the homepage of the internet.

Or perhaps they are. The internet was a wild west system of hyperlinks, where you were responsible for what you hosted. As long as you weren't actively encouraging unlawful behavior, links could go wherever and the DMCA (or similar) would allow you to remove the links (or content if you were actually hosting) as requested. Now we're in the age of Facebook and Youtube were we have algorithms looking for "fake news" and "disturbing content for kids". It's now the job of every website to enforce all the rules of all the lands of this world.

If we really want to go that way. If we really believe that that's how it should be. We're creating a world where Facebook and Google will die. It's impossible to comply with all the laws of all active users. Even attempts to segregate by country won't be enough. Smaller web pages will make it merely because they can go undetected. But in a world where we demand pages are preemptive about abuse, Facebook and Google will be financially murdered with lawsuits. Oh, and Reddit too. If they want to admit implicit complicity, so be it. It won't be long because Taylor Swift* or similar will ruin them.

* And if it's not Taylor Swift or similar, then Forbes would seem to be guilty of a sort of defamation, implying that Reddit took the action because Swift (or similar in character) is litigious about their image.