While lawmakers continue to debate how to prevent deepfakes from spreading misinformation and defaming political figures, private citizens are left to grapple with the growing scale and accessibility of the technology, which is most often used to create nonconsensual, fake porn.
Deepfakes are digitally altered images that use machine learning algorithms to swap one person's face for another's. When they first appeared in late 2017, the term 'deepfake' was coined from its creator's Reddit username. He claimed to be hobbyist programmer, and was posting his creations to a subreddit devoted to photoshopping female celebrities' faces onto porn performers' bodies. Deepfakes became the subject of a now-banned subreddit, dominated by what Reddit called "involuntary fake pornography."
It was easy to find someone to take on my commission. I sent a private message to several creators advertising their services on the site's request forum. A creator got back to me that evening, and I sent him a 13 second video of myself talking into my phone's front-facing camera-about the length of an Instagram story. I also sent him a link to a Pornhub video to put my deepfaked face into.
This creator pointed out, however, that while there is a "safe for work" section on the website, the users who are there for porn outnumber those using the forums to learn about technical data. Looking at the number of threads and posts on each section of the forum confirms this. He also added that even in the technical posts, people frequently use porn clips to demonstrate and compare different programs and algorithms.
I asked both creators if people should have an expectation of privacy in 2019, and their answers were similar. "People are far too relaxed about posting photos and videos on every form of social media," the safe-for-work-only creator said, referring to photos and videos that deepfake creators can use to train machine learning models. The other creator put it more bluntly: "If they upload their life to Facebook then it's their problem really. Whatever [is] shared willingly is free to use."
Limiting your social media presence may not be enough to protect you, either. This victim-blaming attitude goes against what privacy experts say: that while limiting online exposure of your likeness is a good step, even if you keep your images offline, there's no surefire way to protect yourself against bad actors who want to target you with a deepfake.
Looking back at my experience, I'm still stunned by how easy the whole process was. Deepfake porn forums appear on the first page of Google's search results, and creators are willing to make deepfakes for anyone with 13 seconds of video and $30. Some of these platforms boast user counts in the tens of thousands. Google has invested research resources into detecting deepfakes, but it hasn't taken the easy and arguably more important step of making these sites harder to find on its search result pages.
After this particular creator sent me the completed video, he thanked me and told me future videos would be cheaper, as he had already trained the algorithm to recognize my face. Until the U.S. has better nonconsensual porn and media manipulation laws, and until we as a society can address the problem of harassment and abuse via manipulated videos, he'll likely continue to have customers.
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