AI has been hailed as the next big thing in the realm of technology. From breakthroughs in medical research to vehicular automation, the technology has shown promise. But AI has its share of critics too. The likes of Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have raised red flags about the threats it poses to humans.
Thanks to the ‘diligent’ efforts of a community of redditors, AI is now being used to create fake pornographic content known as ‘deepfakes’.
What Exactly Is Deepfakes
As the name suggests, deepfakes is a collection of morphed videos where faces of women celebrities is pasted on pornographic content. It is digitally generated, and obviously created without the consent of the victims.
The etymology of the word can be traced to a Reddit user who goes by the username Deepfakes. The user launched his subreddit, /r/deepfakes, in November 2017 to share the digitally transformed videos of celebrities.
After his content gained popularity, the term acquired a noun-like meaning and all fake celebrity pornographic content generated and circulated since then have been addressed as deepfakes.
Capitalising on the idea and its ‘growth’ prospect, another Reddit user named Deepfakeapp announced the launch of an app named FakeApp. The tool uses artificial intelligence to create deepfakes. Since its launch in January 2018, the explosion of deepfakes has been astronomical.
Old Idea, New Twist
Face Swapping in not an unheard concept. But the twist here is the employment of AI for the purpose. There are several popular face swapping apps such as Snapchat, Face Swap Booth, MSQRD, MixBooth, and others, that provide tools for swapping faces in pictures and creating selfie animations.
This Snapchat feature had created a major controversy last year in India, when popular comedian Tanmay Bhatt posted a video of a mock conversation between two Indian legends, Lata Mangeshkar and Sachin Tendulkar, by swapping his face with theirs.
Offensive Content
Deepfakes creating app Fakeapp employs an algorithm that can scan a person’s face from photos and digitally overlay it on faces in videos. In simple words, the algorithm learns the facial structure of the person and models it on to that of the person in the video chosen to be manipulated. Ironically, open-source AI libraries, such as Keras and TensorFlow, which have been made available freely for research and academic purposes, form the basis of this app.
With the help of open source libraries such as Open CV, face detection for both the image datasets can be performed using Histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) algorithm. Here, two seperate autoencoders are trained on the two image datasets, say, A and B. Now the image A from the first dataset is reconstructed using the second image B’s decoder.
It takes around 40 hours to create a three to five minute clip.
The Threat Of This Rising Trend
The easy availability of this open source tool has led to an explosion of fake celebrity content that make morphed pictures look an outdated idea. One of the first high profile cases of celebrity videos was that of Wonder Woman actor, Gal Gadot. A full-fledged pornographic video was created by Deepfakes himself and this was the video that brought the Reddit user into prominence.
Another Reddit user was in the news because he swapped faces of actors in various movie clips with that of Nicolas Cage.
A Collective Effort Of Many Redditors
While Deepfakes may have started the movement, other Redditors joined in. The different subreddits had, what can be considered, a symbiotic relationship.
Datasets or ‘facesets’ are also being created and shared for this purpose. These facesets contain thousands of images of a celebrity sourced from the internet that help provide photographic data for better modelling of faces.
This weird interdependence on each other was evident in the interlinking of each others subreddits which provided a one-stop-shop for all fake celebrity ‘essentials’.
Why Is It Dangerous
Sadly, the surge in the increasing demand for such content has seen the blatant violation of the dignity and modesty of many female celebrities. Emma Watson, Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, Natalie Portman, Sophie Turner, are some of the celebrities in the growing list of celebrities who have been victimised by the FakeApp tool.
A look at the comments section in these pages paints a very disturbing image of crowd involvement in the idea. From questions for improved technical assistance, specs for the app, to suggesting names of celebrities, people seem to be hooked to this troubling trend of collective fantasies. While some of the requests are simply for content on a particular celebrity, others are more specific like the act that they want to see the celebrity engaging in!
For now, the use of this face swap technology is concentrated around celebrity pornography. But the potential uses of the technology are many.
In a time when the epidemic of fake news is a major concern, such apps could potentially be used to create and circulate minacious political content. Social media is rife with concerns this technology being used to create ‘revenge porn’ or even blackmail people.
The Slow Purge
It was reported that Gfycat, the GIF hosting and creation site removed all the deepfake .gifs from its platform. Online image sharing and hosting site, Imgur, is another community that has removed deepfake contents. Online chat service, Discord, shut down a section on its server that was devoted to deepfakes as it violated their restrictions on the sharing of non-consensual porn.
Social networking site Twitter also banned deepfakes from their platform. Even the popular pornographic site, PornHub, has pulled down deepfakes from their platform.
Surprisingly, Reddit was the last platform to ban the subreddit Deepfakes and the other allied pages for policy violation.
One of the comments found on the Deepfakes page spoke about a forum for protecting and preserving their ‘projects’. This raises the possibility of the content being aggregated elsewhere, maybe the dark web.
However, Deepfakeapp, the page where the FakeApp tool is available, is still active.
Legal Recourse
As there are no fixed laws, the violations that can be attributed to these videos cannot be clearly defined. In case of celebrities, defamation laws may be applicable due their stature. Invasion of privacy could be applicable for both celebrities and individuals. Since the pornographic video used in the fake video is a work protected by copyright laws, the makers of the pornographic video can possibly lay claim. There are laws in most countries to tackle the misuse of images and videos of individuals. Unlike legal pornography where there is consent from the performers, these videos have neither the consent of the people used nor the makers of the original video.
However, the creators of deepfakes have so far been careful enough to use faces of people and celebrity over 18 years of age.
However, Deepfakeapp, the page where the FakeApp tool is available, is still active.
As far as hosting goes, law may protect third party platforms from liability for the content. And in such a case, the removal of content by the site itself is the only recourse.
Conclusion
Deepfakes and the resulting problems are fairly new, but it can safely be said that they have outgrown infancy stage at an accelerated rate. That is why the issue has caught the attention of many sections of the society. Reddit, from where the problem sprung, may have banned the pages that popularised this trend, but the all-essential FakeApp tool is still available on its platform. That is where the real threat lies — and its availability ensures the continuity of this trend.
Only time will tell if this is just a passing erotic fad or a digital epidemic in the making.
