- Some people are taking advantage of artificial intelligence-powered software to superimpose celebrities' faces on top of porn stars to create fake pornographic materials.
- The AI-generated clips have been called "deepfakes," and they use machine learning to mimic facial expressions and make videos look real.
- Major online sharing platforms like Twitter and PornHub are identifying, removing, and banning the content, while Reddit is currently holding out.
"Deepfakes," the latest trend in online pornography is about to take a major hit as Twitter and PornHub are banning its distribution on their platforms from today.
For those out of the loop, deepfakes are porn video clips which feature animated faces of celebrities superimposed on performers’ heads with the magic of artificial intelligence (AI): creators train a software system by feeding it footage of a Hollywood actor or other prominent figure, and the app spits out a video that appears to depict celebrities in a porn production.
PornHub told Motherboard on Tuesday that it’s banning deepfakes as it considers them to be nonconsensual and won’t allow such videos on its site:
"We do not tolerate any nonconsensual content on the site and we remove all said content as soon as we are made aware of it. Nonconsensual content directly violates our TOS [terms of service] and consists of content such as revenge porn, deepfakes or anything published without a person’s consent or permission."
Twitter's also blowing the whistle on deepfakes: It said it will suspend accounts that are identified as the original poster of such content, as well as accounts dedicated to distributing deepfakes.
Chat service Discord and GIF hosting platform Gfycat are also banning these AI-generated clips.
One of the largest sites holding out is Reddit, which is where the trend seems to have taken root last December. The r/deepfakes subreddit is still going strong, with more than 90,000 subscribers at the time of writing.
The community’s rules dissuade people from swapping faces of minors and non-celebrities with those of porn performers in their submissions, and also includes a post linking to a desktop tool for creating deepfakes. It also hosts this thought-provoking discussion:
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