- Porn is done under consent, where participants should be reasonably aware that it will be published
- Porn tarnishes reputations
If you pasted Daisy Ridley's face in a crowd in, say, China, doing every day stuff, no one would rightly care because there's no real potential unless you are doing it for some ulterior motive.
They have been, since inception, illegal, in the sense that they represent a tortious act. They might be illegal in the criminal sense, depending on the jurisdiction, even in the US if absent meaningful context bringing the fake under the protection of the First Amendment as a form of speech.
What if I make a fake video of a specific person being physically attacked?
He didn't consent to be attacked and it may tarnish his reputation. Is it unethical to do any of the above?
Here's why:
1. r/deepfake exists, draws novelty, and has appeal in part because it's explicitly identified as fake. It's part of the name. So there's not only any claim to it being real, it's explicitly identified as fake. It's hard to argue how there's any nonconsensual anything when the parties involved in the deepfake porn all agree and understand it's fake.
2. Let's say that someone posts deepfake porn as real porn. Now this is a different issue, one closer to liable. But that's where there's some misattribution of something to the potential victim. The victimization is from the assertion that it is about the individual (as opposed to a deepfake creation, where the opposite is being asserted).
3. Let's say that, out of curiosity, you, in the privacy of your own home, on your own hardware, create deepfake porn involving your spouse (who fully consents and wants you to do so because it's arousing to them) and publicly available imagery. You do not distribute it. By the "nonconsensual porn" logic, though, you have now engaged in something akin to sexual assault, by engaging in nonconsensual photography. But this is absurd, because the public figure has suffered nothing, and nothing was obtained from them without their consent. It's your (and your spouses') creation.
4. Let's take this a step further, and say that a year from now you create software that will create a simulation of a person solely from its knowledge of what humans look like. Let's say that you obtain something that looks like a celebrity. Have you now created nonconsensual photography?
5. Let's say you find a person who is the doppleganger of a celebrity--a dead-ringer lookalike. You film them in porn. (This has been done actually.) Is that nonconsensual porn, because the celebritie's likeness is being used without their consent? The porn actors/actresses consented, though--why is deepfake any different, when there's nothing to consent? Why do you need porn actors/actresses consent to supercede the celebrities whose likeness they resemble?
The logic behind this reddit (and pornhub, etc.) decision is full of holes as far as I'm concerned, and it creates a very dangerous precedent concerning consent. It essentially gives people power over others' likenesses due to their popularity.
If that fake sex gif you made of your wife gets spread around her workplace, you better believe that would be an extremely humiliating and emotionally traumatic experience. An experience these rules will be created to prevent.
What's there to be on the fence about? It's terrible and a infringement of free speech. But reddit has the right to ban it as a private company. It just make reddit look terrible and hypocritical.
But considering they are planning on IPOing, I guess they have to sell out.