This post was originally published on HuffPost.com. It has been reposted with permission and edited for length.
Trigger warning:
Here’s What It’s Like to See Yourself In a Deepfake Porn Video
By Jesselyn Cook
On a busy workday in March, 28-year-old Kate felt an urgent tap on her shoulder. A colleague wanted to show her a video. She glanced at his computer and was shocked to see her face wincing and moaning. She appeared on-screen to be lying naked on a couch with her legs in the air while a man repeatedly penetrated her.
Kate felt sick. Her co-workers, who’d gathered around to see what was happening, instantly fell silent when they saw the video. It looked real, and Kate was even identified by name, but she knew it couldn’t be. Beyond the obvious—she’d never done porn—she could tell it wasn’t her body; only the face was hers. It had to be some kind of hoax… but would other people believe it?
“It was horrifying,” Kate, who lives in Texas, told HuffPost. “I’d never seen anything like it.”
The video, which is still online and has tens of thousands of views, is a deepfake—a doctored video created with artificial intelligence software that can make someone appear to do or say anything. Deepfake algorithms utilize a dataset of videos and images. This creates a virtual face model for superimposing and manipulating. In Kate’s case, her face was swapped onto a porn actress’ head.
“When it’s Photoshop, it’s a static picture and can be very obvious that it’s not real,” said Kate, who’s been the target of previous misogynistic attacks. “But when it’s your face reacting and moving, there’s this panic that you have no control over how people use your image.”
At first, deepfake porn almost exclusively featured female celebrities; their television and movie appearances gave video creators plenty of material to work with. With advancing technology, ordinary women with just a few public photos or videos are increasingly becoming targets for manipulation.
HuffPost spoke to six women who have been digitally inserted into porn without their consent. Pseudonyms identify those quoted here to protect their privacy and are speaking out to call attention to an issue left to fester in the shadows.
As deepfake porn continues to upend women’s lives, there’s been little media coverage, and there still exists no criminal recourse for victims.
“The harm done to women when it comes to this kind of sexual objectification is happening now,” said Mary Anne Franks, a law professor at the University of Miami and president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative. “It’s almost like people have forgotten that this is what this technology started as, and the conversation around women has fallen away.”
Deepfakes Are Rooted In Misogyny
Deepfakes have been weaponized against women for as long as they’ve existed.
The term “deepfake” was coined in 2017 by an anonymous Reddit user who shared doctored porn videos like the one above, which portrays “Wonder Woman” star Gal Gadot. Today, major porn websites are filled with deepfakes, despite promises to ban them. (MindGeek, which owns Pornhub and other erotic video sites, did not respond to repeated requests for comment about the no-deepfakes policy it announced more than a year ago.)
Other tech platforms have wavered in their approach to deepfakes hosted on their sites, torn between calls to stamp out disinformation and to protect free expression.
Without any such intervention or effective policies in place, deepfake porn has carved out a comfortable space online—and it’s thriving. In addition to free, easy-to-use deepfake generator apps, there are now photo search engines (which HuffPost won’t name) that allow people to upload pictures of individuals to find porn actresses with similar features for optimal face-swapping results. There are even deepfake porn forums where men make paid requests for professional-looking videos of specific women and share links to the women’s social media profiles for source imagery. HuffPost has observed requesters seeking porn with female Twitch, YouTube, and Instagram influencers, as well as the requesters’ co-workers, friends, and exes.
On one such forum, someone asked for a sex video of Tina, a 24-year-old Canadian woman, and dropped a link to her YouTube channel. Four days later, a deepfake popped up that appeared to show her bent over naked on a bed with one man thrusting behind her and another stroking his penis near her head. The virtually seamless video is still up with thousands of views.
“I was shocked and disturbed,” Tina, who learned of the video when an acquaintance sent her a link, told HuffPost. “Seeing my face where it shouldn’t be felt weird and gross.”
According to his profile, the video poster claimed that the creator is a middle-aged man. Tina has no idea who he is. She thought about trying to get the video taken down but didn’t see a point once she realized it had already been shared with other websites.
“You know how the internet is—once something is uploaded, it can never really get deleted,” she said. “It will just be reposted forever.”
It Could Happen To Anyone
Until recently, highly skilled editors could only do convincing, deepfake-style video manipulation. Hollywood filmmakers have digitally inserted actors into movies posthumously, for example, which required a considerable amount of footage of the actors’ faces to work with. Now, rapidly advancing technology has democratized this kind of deceptive video-editing practice at women’s expense. We’ve reached a point where even amateurs with relatively few pictures of their target’s face can create deepfake porn on their own.
One self-proclaimed video creator, who describes himself online as a 25-year-old Greek man and “one of the first guys” to make deepfake porn, solicits donations and paid requests on multiple forums. People have watched his videos more than 300,000 times.
Deepfakes are “no different from a photoshop manipulation or artist drawing/rendering,” the man, who did not reveal his name, told HuffPost. Asked if anyone ever requests that he remove the sex videos he uploads, he replied: “There are no takedowns.”
Despite disregarding women’s privacy, he seems rather concerned with protecting his own: “I’m accepting payments in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies (no PayPal/credit card due to privacy reasons),” he wrote in one post. In another, he listed his price range as around $15 to $40 per video.
“Women can tell men, ‘I don’t want to date you, I don’t want to know you, I don’t want to take my clothes off for you,’ but now men can say, ‘Oh yeah? I’m going to force you to, and if I can’t do it physically, I will do it virtually,’” said Franks. “There’s nothing you can do to protect yourself except not exist online.”
She’s hopeful that as people become increasingly aware of deepfakes and deepfake porn in particular, they’ll become more skeptical of what they see online.
“The only silver lining, if you can even call it that,” she said, “is that the more people know about this, the more they’ll start to question if [revenge porn videos] are real.”
But deepfakes have also broadened the threat of revenge porn or nonconsensual porn. A vindictive creep no longer needs nudes or sex tapes of a woman who’s spurned him to leak online. He just needs her Facebook or Instagram photos to deepfake into existing porn. And as these videos get easier to make, they also get harder to recognize.
Like many women, Amy, a mother and business owner based in Los Angeles, has experienced similar harassment. The harassment involved crudely altered images that were disturbing but clearly fake. She’d never heard of deepfakes until she was featured in one that portrays her having sex and labels her a “slut.” In the comments section, people have commended the anonymous creator for the video’s believability.
“It didn’t get concerning until the technology and skill level of those putting it together got better—to the point where people might believe that was me,” Amy told HuffPost. “If we see a video of something, we consider it fact.”
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, a branch of the U.S. Department of Defense, has been working in recent years to develop machine-learning algorithms that can detect manipulated videos, including deepfakes. Much of the challenge lies in keeping pace with deepfake software as it continues to evolve.
“As the people making these videos get more and more sophisticated with their tools, we’re going to have to get more and more sophisticated with ours,” Edward Delp, a media forensics expert at Purdue University who’s conducting research for DARPA, said in a recent interview with HuffPost. “It’s going to be an arms race.”
No Real Options For Victims
Maya, a 29-year-old woman who also lives in Los Angeles, wasn’t aware that she was featured in deepfake porn until HuffPost contacted her. But she wasn’t entirely surprised: She’s been receiving a lot of messages lately from strangers requesting sex.
“Being violated in such an intimate way is a weird feeling,” Maya told HuffPost. “The idea of people sexualizing me makes me feel like I’m being fetishized, receiving unwanted attention, losing respect as a person, and no longer safe.”
The unfortunate reality for Maya and other women in her situation is that there’s not much they can do now that the videos are out there. Lawsuits can be extremely expensive, and to sue for harassment, impersonation, defamation, or even misappropriation of image—which typically only applies to celebrities—you need to know who you’re suing. Like many victims of nonconsensual deepfake porn, Maya has no clue who created or posted the video of her.
“As disappointing and sobering as it is, there aren’t a lot of options for victims,” said Carrie Goldberg, an attorney specializing in sexual privacy. Deepfake websites exist “to monetize people’s humiliation,” she added.
Women Are Being Silenced
Last spring, investigative journalist Rana Ayyub experienced a targeted disinformation campaign in India. The campaign aimed to intimidate and humiliate her.
The abuse began the day after she publicly condemned a political party’s shameful response to the rape of a young girl. Suddenly, screenshots showing a series of defamatory tweets falsely appearing to be from Ayyub began circulating online. She then realized a deepfake porn video featuring her face was spreading across social media like wildfire, alongside her name and phone number. It was viewed hundreds of thousands of times, and Ayyub started getting calls and messages asking for sex.
“It was devastating,” she told HuffPost UK. “The entire country was watching a porn video that claimed to be me, and I just couldn’t bring myself to do anything.”
Even now that the video has been debunked as fake, Ayyub will never be able to move on fully. She can’t undo the damage to her reputation, and she’s afraid of drawing more attention to herself on social media.
“I used to be very opinionated; now I’m much more cautious about what I post online. I’ve self-censored quite a bit out of necessity,” she said. “I’m constantly thinking, ‘What if someone does something to me again?’”
Kate, the woman from Texas whose co-worker found deepfake porn of her, has struggled to move forward too. Her lawyer explained the case’s difficulty, citing the challenge of fighting without knowing the video’s origin.
Unable to find legal options, Kate reluctantly turned to the deepfake forum, requesting the removal of the posted video. The site owner told her she wasn’t the only woman on the page, then stopped replying, Kate said. She felt hopeless.
“It’s grotesque to know that it lives out there, and there’s nothing I can do about it,” she said. “These things are so believable, and you desperately want to say, ‘That’s not me!’ But that would just bring more attention to it.”
Kate, like Ayyub, limits online sharing, fearing distortion and misuse of her content without consequences.
“Pornographic deepfakes and revenge porn and all that kind of stuff are only going to make women want to say less,” she said. “As these videos get more prolific and realistic, is this something we’re just going to be expected to accept as the cost of being online?”
To read the full article on HuffPost.com by Jesselyn Cook, click here.
