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Comment by barry-cotter | Hacker News Reader

The kinds of people who work for Pornhub aren’t going to have moral qualms about this[1] and there’s no way you can ban deep fakes as such under the First Amendment. Either there will be regulation of porn on grounds of obscenity or the current free for all will continue but there’s no way deep fakes will be banned and the rest of porn left alone.

[1] https://fightthenewdrug.org/pornhub-refused-to-remove-videos...

https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/stories-51391981

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Your source [1] doesn't exactly appear neutral.

I got a popup that said "PORN KILLS LOVE" TM copyright by "Fight the New Drug, Inc" and then I thought "ooh this is propaganda" and didn't actually read the article.

That source does suck, but this has happened to multiple women.

It seems likeness rights might be sufficient? You can't put random college athlete's in a video game, the situations aren't exactly the same but I don't see many 1st amendment purists even talking about likeness rights.

>>You can't put random college athlete's in a video game

I'm pretty sure you can, as in - the law doesn't forbid you from doing so. But the person you are portraying may and will sue you for damages and/or portion of your profits. But that would be a civil case, not a criminal one, right?

Civil cases still revolve around law violations- they just aren't brought by the government.

Edit: I was wrong :)

No? If you sign an agreement with someone, and then break it, no law has been broken. The other party can sue you for breaking the contract in civil court and win, but there is no law that says you cannot break agreements signed with someone. Of course there might be cases in civil court which are about law violations, but it's not a universal rule.

Commercial speech is subject to more regulation than non commercial speech. Likeness rights in commercial speech are already a thing.

Also if you aren't very explicit in saying that this is not really a famous celebrity, then you're basically defaming that celebrity, which is also not protected speech.

There's probably a legal argument that a deepfake of someone doing something scandalous (eg starring in pornography) counts as libel.

> Libel is a method of defamation expressed by print, writing, pictures, signs, effigies, or any communication embodied in physical form that is injurious to a person's reputation, exposes a person to public hatred, contempt or ridicule, or injures a person in his/her business or profession. [1]

A pornographic deepfake is certainly a "defamation expressed by [...] picture [...] that is injurious to a person's reputation" insofar as it creates a false impression about the person which is detrimental to their reputation.

[1]: https://www.thefreedictionary.com/libel

I am wondering about the implications of deep image generation when it comes to child pornography. It is one of the few kinds of speech that is not protected under the First Amendment.

How would it be possible to tell an image created with image2text or similar was generated from a model trained on images of child pornography? In this case it would probably still be illegal. Although nobody is harmed from the generation of such an image the courts would probably only care about where the source of the image originated, as with copyright.

Or what about using the likeness of a child on the body of a consenting adult for a deepfake? I that case nobody is harmed to begin with.

An appalling story - but the legitimate news source (the BBC - the other link is a campaigning blog which omits relevant information) makes it clear that PornHub have fully acknowledged they completely failed the victim here.

Its not clear how you move from that story to "The kinds of people who work for Pornhub aren’t going to have moral qualms about this", and even less clear what this has to do with DeepFakes.

There is clearly a real problem with people sharing non-consensual real material; we probably shouldn't muddy the water by mixing it with the phenomenon of DeepFakes - the morality of which is pretty much just a matter of opinion.

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