Last week we brought word on the internet’s latest distasteful viral sensation; fake, yet ultra-convincing, celebrity pornography.
The so-called “deepfakes” take footage of stars like Katy Perry and Scarlett Johansson and use AI software and powerful graphics tech to superimpose faces onto the bodies of porn actresses.
Now, and not before time, the pushback against the advanced face-swapping tech has begun.
Gfycat has started to remove all deepfakes — named after the Reddit user who popularised the craze last December — from its servers, much to the chagrin of creators.
“Our terms of service allow us to remove content that we find objectionable. We are actively removing this content,” Gfycat told Motherboard in a statement.
The deepfakes subreddit community began noticing the takedowns on Tuesday and are upset about the “targeted purge” of the content.
Minimal technical expertise
While Gfycat doesn’t prohibit pornography, the deepfakes videos certainly fall outside the platform’s terms of service.
It says content is subject to removal if it “infringes any intellectual property or other proprietary rights of any party” is subject to removal” or is “unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortious, excessively violent, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive of another’s privacy, hateful racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable.”
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The practice has become more widespread on Reddit in recent weeks, thanks to the release of the free FakeApp desktop app that enables deepfakes to be created with minimal technical expertise.
“I think the current version of the app is a good start, but I hope to streamline it even more in the coming days and weeks,” they app’s creator said.
“Eventually, I want to improve it to the point where prospective users can simply select a video on their computer, download a neural network correlated to a certain face from a publicly available library, and swap the video with a different face with the press of one button.”
What’s your view on Deepfakes? Share it with us @TrustedReviews on Twitter.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
