I shouldn’t have to accept being in deepfake porn
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
While I understand the desire to stamp-out the use of deepfakes to insert unsuspecting women into pornographic images and video, I feel at least as much energy should be spent in eliminating (or at least reducing) the harm that comes to women's reputations as a result.
The fact that a deepfake can humiliate and shame a woman and even cause her to lose her job and friends exposes a problem in our society that I feel is at least as problematic as that which would cause someone to create the deepfake in the first place.
I agree wholeheartedly.
There is no reason for naked human body to be considered shameful, regardless of the gender. Reasons for such beliefs are usually based on either keeping up the status quo, or some archaic or religious belief in "dirtiness" of sexuality (except in the restricted case approved by the said tradition/religion).
So they can be made to touch another naked body in a video? Wow, that's so much worse... \s
Sex is nothing to be ashamed of, either. Society should really just move on.
Why should it be different if they use a different tool to create the picture?
The audience for that seems limited to malicious weirdos who already have zero respect for the victim. Any influence it might have on their opinions seems irrelevant.
Of course, this has no bearing on the personal violation one feels when exposed to this sort of abuse. But for deepfake porn to somehow influence public perception is hard for me to grasp. Are there any examples of real reputational damage stemming from this?
The potential consequences of such a revelation that “they might’ve been a pornographic actor” could give rise to a future scandal during an election. Even the slightest insinuation of involvement in the adult entertainment industry can inflict significant damage, particularly for women.
We’re actually seeing AI-generated imagery being used more and more in political propaganda (eg https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/25/technology/ai-elections-d...). It’s not unreasonable to think this will become a major point in a future election, even if it hasn’t yet.
I ask again, is there any evidence that such allegations have ever been taken seriously?
I can't see fake porn having any reach, except amongst low-IQ consumers of internet trash, who are not only susceptible to obvious propaganda, but are already politically aligned against the victim.
Other AI generated content may have more impact, but that's another conversation.
You seem to have made your mind and no further discussion is possible.
On the topic of people believing outlandish things on whimsy evidence: Plenty of people were convinced Hillary Clinton was running an underground child pornography ring in a pizza basement based on paintings hung in someone’s house.
Maybe they were all politically aligned against her from the start, or maybe they weren’t and it affected the 2016 election. How would we know?
While no poll is 100% accurate, as long as you make it statistically significant and introduce a good control (say multiple fake and real stories, with some of them positive too), you'll get good signal and ability to say exactly if it did affect the election.
That could be construed as satisfying the critical legal element of a defamation claim:
1) a false statement purporting to be fact.
If someone were to draw a watercolor painting of a likeness of a President one doesn't like having sex with an equally despised congresswoman, most would agree that this is a classic "free speech issue" and is the very sort of protected speech that first ammendment clearly protects.
Ignoring tangential issues, like the copyright of the images used in the "deep fake", how is this situation any different?
That notion is going to have to die, and soon.
You would be wrong; there are many legal issues which can protect identifiable people from having their likeness used, especially if it is (1) without consent and (2) in a "private place" (or depicted in an intimate/private situation).
The person whose likeness is used would very much have recourse to sue, whether it's the painter of a watercolor or someone who generates a deepfake. The same principles apply.
In any case there shouldn’t be any difference I would imagine. There’s already precedent in United States, but circumstances matter.
Yes, exactly, and by asking these sort of questions we can clarify what that scale is, exactly.
When exactly does a "firecracker" turn in to a "bomb"? What are any objective difference between the two? etc.
Here is some deepfake porn I just created of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton:
\ Õ /
\ | /
|
----D <-----O
/ \ /| \
/ \ / | \
Level of realism?
A deepfake is a deepfake because it is a synthetic ("fake") image that depicts a real person/thing and is the output of a program that utilises deep learning.
Its not deepfake at all, much less very good deepfake.
“Deepfake” has a meaning, and its not the same as just “fake”.
Also, the "traditional wholesome art mediums" thing is a bit weird to use for an argument, to me anyway. The act is made much more disturbing and violent owing to the image being created by hand, with care and attention.
The post I replied to introduced the term 'violated'. It asks "are you as violated?" -- you'll note that 'as' being present indicates that something can be more or less violated -- it was also their assumption that in either case there would be some amount of violation felt. My reply to their post is based on the framework that they established. Take it up with them.
To take action with intent to harm another is violence. To (seek to) inflict damage, destruction, pain or suffering is violent.
Speech that directly causes harm to others is not just about legality.
Normative behavior and ethics are subjective as well. They are also subjected to the whims of the mob of the moment.
If a specific someone (like the author) says I do not want a deepfake porn of me, and someone else says I don't care, I made one ..
Was harm done? If no, why not?
No…if there is no objective legal definition of harm to confirm the subjective understanding of harm in your example.
Yes…if there is an objective legal definition of harm to confirm the subjective understanding of harm in your example.
Letting yourself be an empty vessel for the state to fill as they seem fit sounds sacrificial.
"My rights end at the end of my fist." is a common phrase. And it's demonstrable, due to "christian" society, that nude women are punished socially for it. We even have capture at the credit card companies for buying porn, and prostitution is illegal mostly everywhere. And even events where clothing is optional, is set to 21, and not 18.
I await the day that simple nudity is just that - no clothes. But we're still in basically the 1600's with puritanical backwards thinking that they can't even be shirtless like men, for "sexual reasons". I only think about "nipplegate" back in 2004 superbowl where Jackson's nipple was what, 4 pixels? And people collectively freaked out?
Until our society can fucking grow up from 5th grade antics, yeah, its harm. And you shouldn't need to be told not to harm others, but again, collective age is 11/5th grade.
- If you actually do blackface, you are accountable by current social standards on that matter
- If someone releases a deepfake of you in blackface and doesn't make clear it's machine generated, you can sue them for libel
- If some releases a ML photo of you in blackface and clearly states it's machine generated, you are accountable for nothing and they are accountable by current social standards regarding blackface.
I was talking about personal responsibility in not harming someone else. If your ethical guidance is so broken, you need a law to tell you what you should and shouldn't do, I feel tremendously sorry for you.
Does portayal of blackface harm? Yes, it does to the BiPOC community, with terrible racial stereotypes. So don't fucking do it. Again, this isn't a hard concept to figure out.
If we all tried to do things that even minimally considered "is this thing going to harm others" and not doing it, we would have a better and more respectful society. And no more laws needed.
The fact that people share these videos is rapidly becoming immaterial. Face swapping software doesn't require some sort of underground network, one person can do this for themselves without the videos ever being shared.
So whilst she may be able to avoid the harassment problem of having specific videos thrust into her face on Twitter or whatever - they'll still be out there, just behind closed doors.
Or even barely behind closed doors at all - given suitable software, it's not hard to come up with the prompt "Fred Bloggs sitting on a cucumber in stockings".
Honestly, there's so much porn being dumped on the internet every day if you'd avoid drawing attention to it and quietly torpedo it via DMCA, yours would quietly disappear. But you could also write an article about it in a major paper and ensure it never goes away, and people get pissed at you and make more.
Give it another year or two for TTS to become commodity and she'll have way worse problems (like identity theft, and bomb threats made in her voice, spoofed from her number) to worry about.
The issue is that it is becoming so trivial to generate imagery that no distribution is necessary, unless we consider powerful image generation tools to be akin to munitions of some sort and ban those too.
I have so many questions on this line alone, it's a world I didn't know existed. What is a Google Alert? How does Google know this deepfake exists? How does Google go about determining a real vs deepfaked pornographic video?
In the olden days we used to have (and some of us still do) have Google Alerts on our names to see if it pops up on Google.
The system remembers the results and notifies you of any new ones that pop up.
It also used to be a good tool to keep track of specific topics you're interested in, nowadays there's too much of everything for it to really work.
But is complex to draw hard lines in this because asymmetries between public people and not so public ones doing that, or good uses of the technology, freedom concerns and the potential of AI generation. Its not so much the tool, but certain people that misuses it. And stopping the bad uses in a generic way may cause more harm or abuses than not doing it.
How does that work?
Then you'll get an email every time a new result with your name appears in Google's indexes.