Creating ‘Deepfake’ Porn May Soon Be as Easy as Using Instagram

Just three months after Samsung announced that the company had developed a new algorithm that allowed users to create “deepfake” videos from just a single image of an individual’s face, an expert in video verification warns that the technology for creating fake videos, including deepfake, non-consensual porn, is advancing at such a rapid pace that it will soon be as easy to use as an Instagram photo filter, according to a report in Britain’s Daily Star newspaper.  "It will soon be as easy to create a fake as it is to add an Instagram filter and women will be the primary target of the weaponization of this deepfake technology,” said Shamir Allibhai, CEO of Amber, which makes a new app designed to detect deepfake videos. “The havoc is two-fold,” Allibhai told the Star. “At a primary level, relationships will be broken, people will be blackmailed. On a deeper level, society will become cynical if we don’t have video veracity solutions in effect. We will evolve to become distrusting and view everything with skepticism.” Deepfakes are forged digital videos in which a person’s face in realistically superimposed into a scene involving others—creating the theoretically seamless illusion that the person participated in actions that he or she never did. As AVN.com reported, the earliest use of the deepfake artificial intelligence technology was to create phony porn clips using the faces of well-known celebrities—making it appear that the celebs were performing explicit sexual acts on camera. But according to Allibhai, sometime in the next few years, the technology will have progressed to the point at which any user, with no special technical know-how, could create a deepfake porn video not just of a celebrity, but of anyone. Such Hollywood actresses as Scarlett Johanssen, Emma Watson, Aubrey Plaza, Gal Gadot and others have appeared without their consent in deepfake porn videos. The technology used to create deepfake porn, and other types of deepfake video, is advancing much faster than the tech used to detect and expose deepfakes, according to a Washington Post report. “We are outgunned,” digital forensics expert Hany Farid told the Post. “The number of people working on the video-synthesis side, as opposed to the detector side, is 100 to 1.” Deepfakes currently require an underlying video clip in which to superimpose the face of an individual not in the video. Deepfake porn clios were created by simply imposing a face onto an existing porn clip, as in the deepfake Ivanka Trump video at this highly NSFW link. But Allibhai warns that in the not-too-distant future, “video will be generated from scratch, with no basis in actual footage." Photo via PornHub screen capture