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:Setting a bad precedent

[irrational_design]

Except now you can see that the technology to do it is not revolutionary, but merely evolutionary.

Re:Setting a bad precedent

[RhettLivingston]

I'm actually encouraged by the slowdown in "real computing" speed increases. The answer is in different computing, not faster computing. Until the current path gets difficult, we won't go off the path and find true breakthroughs.

Re:Setting a bad precedent

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I agree with you. I've gone back and forth about this and haven't been sure what to make of it.

The thing about deepfakes, from a moral or legal perspective, is that they are explicit about the porn being fake. So it doesn't make sense to me that it's "nonconsensual" pornography because the posters are posting it explicitly as being fake, because it's fake. That's part (emphasizing the part) of the reason for its appeal--the novelty of it.

If someone posted some deepfake porn and misrepresented it as real, it seems then you'd have real grounds for liable or something like that.

I guess I also see this as setting a really bad precedent, because I see the logic as basically flawed.

Think of it another way: if I make deepfake porn on my own computer, and don't share it, have I now engaged in some sort of sexual assault or nonconsensual act? Because that's what this logic leads to. But that seems flawed to me because I created it without any involvement of the other person at all, with nothing that was obtained without their consent.

Who Owns You

[LeftCoastThinker]

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.

Voat has taken over from Reddit

[Anonymous Coward]

https://voat.co/v/DeepFake

Precedent on this was set decades ago

[Solandri]

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.

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.

But what about satire?

[Miles_O'Toole]

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.

Voat = Good intentions; invaded by assholes

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

<ramble/><ramble/><ramble/>

Commercial exploitation != scribbles

[DrYak]

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.