YahooNews senior editor Mike Beberes (“Taylor Swift isn’t the only victim of AI porn. Can the spread of deepfake nudes be stopped?“):
Fake nude pictures of celebrities are not a new phenomenon, but thanks to advanced and widely available artificial intelligence tools, it is now possible to quickly produce high-quality images or videos featuring anyone’s likeness in any scenario imaginable. While a lot of attention has been paid to how deepfakes could be used to spread misinformation, research shows that 98% of all AI-generated videos online are pornographic and nearly all of the individuals targeted are women.
Celebrities like actresses, musicians and social media influencers are most frequently featured in deepfake porn, but there are many examples of average women and girls also being targeted. Last year, administrators at a New Jersey high school discovered that some students had used AI to create fake nude images of more than 30 of their classmates. Similar incidents have been reported at other schools in the U.S. and abroad.
It’s illegal to share real nude images of someone without their consent in almost every state, especially if they’re a minor. But the laws around artificial porn are much weaker — even though the harm caused to victims can be the same whether the content is fake or genuine. There is no federal law concerning deepfake porn and only about 10 states have statutes banning it. Most social media sites prohibit AI porn, but the scale of the problem and lax moderation mean it can still be rampant on their platforms. One post featuring Swift deepfakes was live on X, formerly Twitter, for 17 hours and gathered more than 45 million views before it was taken down.
Like so many other harmful things online, it may be impossible to completely eradicate AI porn. But experts say there are plenty of things that can be done to make it dramatically less prevalent and limit the damage it causes.
Several bills have been proposed in Congress that would create nationwide protections against deepfake porn, either by creating new legal penalties for those who create or share it or by giving victims new rights to seek damages after they’ve been targeted. Supporters of these plans say that, even if the new laws didn’t sweep up every bad actor, they would lead to some high-profile cases that would scare others away from creating deepfakes.
Outside of new laws, many tech industry observers argue that the public needs to put pressure on the various mainstream entities that allow people to create, find, spread and profit from AI porn — including social media platforms, credit card companies, AI developers and search engines. There’s also hope that fear of lawsuits from someone like Swift could create enough financial risk that these groups will begin taking deepfakes more seriously.
At the same time, some experts make the case that the war against AI porn has effectively already been lost. In their view, the technical problem of finding and blocking so many deepfakes is basically unsolvable and even the most aggressive new laws or policies will only capture a tiny fraction of the flood of fake explicit content that’s out there.
This is a classic case of technology advancing faster than lawmakers and regulators can understand it. While I’ve written about the phenomenon a couple of times, going back to a post almost exactly six years ago (“‘Deep Fakes’ a Looming Crisis“), I certainly don’t claim any expertise. But even then, I understood “This is going to be next to impossible to combat.”
Writing at Rolling Stone a couple weeks back, right after the Swift deepfakes started circulating, Miles Klee elaborated (“Swifties Want a Massive Crackdown on AI-Generated Nudes. They Won’t Get One“):
Swift’s superstardom, signs of Congressional support, and a highly motivated stan army would seem to promise powerful momentum for any attempt to eradicate these nonconsensual AI nudes. But that crusade will come up against a thorny and forbidding set of complications, according to civil liberty experts — no matter how fired up the Swifties are.
“They’re a huge force, and they advocated,” says Katharine Trendacosta, director of policy and advocacy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on internet users’ privacy and free expression. “But they did that after Ticketmaster, and we somehow still have Ticketmaster,” she adds, referring to Swifties savaging the company as a price-gouging monopoly (and in some cases even filing lawsuits) due to its mishandling of ticket sales for Swift’s Eras Tour. In the AI fight, too, Trendacosta says, we’ll see “the unstoppable movement of the Swifties versus the immovable object that is the legislature,” a Congress slow to respond to “basically anything.”
But it’s not just that Congress is broken, mostly because Republicans refuse to vote for even things they support if it might help Democrats, but because crafting legislation here is fraught with all manner of technical and ideological challenges.
Reform and government oversight, however, is difficult, Trendacosta says, not least because legislators’ ideas of how to combat deceptive AI have been all backwards. The EFF, for instance, opposes the No Artificial Intelligence Fake Replicas And Unauthorized Duplications (No AI FRAUD) Act, introduced by Reps. María Elvira Salazar of Florida and Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania earlier this month. Why? Because in seeking to guarantee “individual property rights in likeness and voice,” the proposed law would broaden publicity rights — that is, your right to not have a company falsely claim you endorse their product — to any kind of digital representation, “from pictures of your kid, to recordings of political events, to docudramas, parodies, political cartoons, and more,” as EFF notes in a statement on the bill. Other critics have also warned of the chilling effect this would have on digital free speech. Under its expansive language, sharing a Saturday Night Live clip that features an impression of Swift would potentially be a criminal offense.
That strikes me as more than a bit of a stretch. But, for example, parody is protected speech and, broadly speaking, so is most consensual pornography.
“I know several legislators are attempting to either write new bills, or adjust existing laws around revenge porn to prosecute it, but much of this is incredibly new,” says Mike Stabile of the Free Speech Coalition, the trade association of the U.S. adult entertainment industry. “As detestable as [nonconsensual AI porn] might be, it’s still technically speech, and efforts to curtail it or ban it may face hurdles in the courts.”
“In the short term, platforms are the best tool in blocking widespread distribution,” Stabile says, adding that adult sites including Pornhub and Clips4sale “have been ahead of the pack on this, and banned deepfakes and revenge porn years ago.” Of course, these rules depend on enforcement — and that, according to Trendacosta, can be an insurmountable task in itself.
“The problem we often see with with the largest companies, like on Facebook or on Google or even Twitter, which isn’t even that big, is that the enforcement is really selective because they have so much content,” she says. “It’s actually just impossible.” Incidents like the sudden proliferation of AI-spawned illustrations of Swift in sexual scenes will draw the most focus and garner a relatively quick response, whereas “the already victimized or marginalized” receive little help, if any, Trendacosta says. The outcry over Swift’s admittedly terrible situation has far outstripped, for example, concern for kids whose pictures are fed into AI models to create child sex abuse material.
Plus, Trendacosta points out, there are practical limits to the engineering side of the equation. People want to believe that “if the problem is the technology then the technician should be able to fix it by building a new technology,” she says, but this doesn’t get to the systemic roots of the problem. The Microsoft software used to create pornographic images of Swift has guardrails meant to prevent exactly this kind of misuse; bad actors found ways around them. Neither can we completely rely on filtering tech to catch platform violations. “Machines don’t understand context,” Trendacosta says. “If I draw a politician semi-nude to make fun of him, that’s protected political speech. Machines don’t know that.”
Now, frankly, if we could solve the potentially massive problem of deepfakes of celebrities and ex-wives and girlfriends proliferating, I would be willing to sacrifice semi-nude politician parodies. Especially given that most of our politicians nowadays are in their 80s. But, yes, setting parameters is likely incredibly challenging.
So while it’s easy to establish a general consensus that it’s wrong to disseminate AI porn that victimizes a pop star, the question of how we could prevent it while guaranteeing the same protections for average citizens — and preserving First Amendment rights — is very much unsettled. On the one hand, our technologies and the human teams behind them aren’t up to the task. On the other, government overcorrection might leave us with heavily restricted social networks that close off legitimate forms of commentary.
The lines here are sufficiently blurry that I don’t have a strong sense of what’s at stake on the speech side. Again, if it’s simply a matter of more sophisticated versions of images of Donald Trump making out with Vladimir Putin, it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make. The balance on the other end is rather stark, having moved well beyond the theoretical.
As Wired‘s Matt Burgess noted (“Deepfake Porn Is Out of Control“) last October,
A new analysis of nonconsensual deepfake porn videos, conducted by an independent researcher and shared with WIRED, shows how pervasive the videos have become. At least 244,625 videos have been uploaded to the top 35 websites set up either exclusively or partially to host deepfake porn videos in the past seven years, according to the researcher, who requested anonymity to avoid being targeted online.
Over the first nine months of this year, 113,000 videos were uploaded to the websites—a 54 percent increase on the 73,000 videos uploaded in all of 2022. By the end of this year, the analysis forecasts, more videos will have been produced in 2023 than the total number of every other year combined.
These startling figures are just a snapshot of how colossal the issues with nonconsensual deepfakes has become—the full scale of the problem is much larger and encompasses other types of manipulated imagery. A whole industry of deepfake abuse, which predominantly targets women and is produced without people’s consent or knowledge, has emerged in recent years. Face-swapping apps that work on still images and apps where clothes can be “stripped off a person” in a photo with just a few clicks are also highly prominent. There are likely millions of images being created with these apps.
“This is something that targets everyday people, everyday high school students, everyday adults—it’s become a daily occurrence,” says Sophie Maddocks, who conducts research on digital rights and cyber-sexual violence at the University of Pennsylvania. “It would make a lot of difference if we were able to make these technologies harder to access. It shouldn’t take two seconds to potentially incite a sex crime.”
[…]
The research also identified an additional 300 general pornography websites that incorporate nonconsensual deepfake pornography in some way. The researcher says “leak” websites and websites that exist to repost people’s social media pictures are also incorporating deepfake images. One website dealing in photographs claims it has “undressed” people in 350,000 photos.
Measuring the full scale of deepfake videos and images online is incredibly difficult. Tracking where the content is shared on social media is challenging, while abusive content is also shared in private messaging groups or closed channels, often by people known to the victims. In September, more than 20 girls aged 11 to 17 came forward in the Spanish town of Almendralejo after AI tools were used to generate naked photos of them without their knowledge.
Further, as his colleague Megan Farokhmanesh noted last March (“The Debate on Deepfake Porn Misses the Point“), the focus on “fake” may minimize the harm:
It’s not enough that some viewers can tell the media is fake. The consequences are real. Victims are harassed with explicit video and images made in their semblance, an experience some liken to assault. Repeated harassment with these videos or images can be traumatizing. Friends and family don’t always have the online literacy to understand that the media has been falsified. Streamers watch as their personal and professional brands are polluted through a proliferation of explicit content created without their knowledge or consent.
Arguing that deepfakes can’t be harmful because they’re not “real” is as reductive as it is false. It’s ignorant to proclaim they’re no big deal while the people impacted are telling you they are. Deepfakes can inflict “the same kinds of harms as an actual piece of media recorded from a person would,” says Cailin O’Connor, author of The Misinformation Age and a professor at the University of California, Irvine. “Whether or not they’re fake, the impression still lasts.”
And, for all intent and purposes, once something is on the Internet, it’s forever.
[R]emoving any content from the internet is a Sisyphean task, even under the best of circumstances. Blaire, who had vowed to sue the deepfake creator responsible, learned from multiple lawyers that she’s unable to do so without the help of federal legislation. Only three states—California, Texas, and Virginia—have laws in place to specifically address deepfakes, and these are shaky at best. Section 230 absolves a site’s owner of legal liability from users posting illicit content. And as long as someone acts in “good faith” to remove content, they’re essentially safe from punishment—which may explain why the page’s owner posted an apology in which they call the impact of their deepfakes “eye opening.”
Laws and regulations dealing with issues like these are impossible to enact with any speed, let alone against the lightning-fast culture of the internet. “The general picture we ought to be looking at is something like the equivalent of the FDA or the EPA,” says O’Connor, “where you have a flexible regulatory body, and various interests online have to work with that body in order to be in compliance with certain kinds of standards.” With that kind of system in place, O’Connor believes progress could be made. “The picture that I think we should all be forwarding is one where our regulation is as flexible and able to change as things on the internet are flexible and able to change.”
Alas, there’s a very good chance the Supreme Court will invalidate that entire concept—Congress delegating regulatory decisions to executive agencies with extreme deference from the judiciary—moot in this coming term.
Again, I lack the expertise to have real solutions to offer here. But we’re well beyond the stage where this is merely a theoretical problem. Faked videos are doing real harm to real people.
