Supercharged by powerful and widely available artificial-intelligence software developed by Google, these lifelike "deepfake" videos have quickly multiplied across the Internet, blurring the line between truth and lie.
But the videos have also been weaponized disproportionately against women, representing a new and degrading means of humiliation, harassment and abuse. The fakes are explicitly detailed, posted on popular porn sites and increasingly challenging to detect. And although their legality hasn't been tested in court, experts say they may be protected by the First Amendment — even though they might also qualify as defamation, identity theft or fraud.
In September, Google added "involuntary synthetic pornographic imagery" to its ban list, allowing anyone to request the search engine block results that falsely depict them as "nude or in a sexually explicit situation." But there's no easy fix to their creation and spread.
A growing number of deepfakes target women far from the public eye, with anonymous users on deepfakes discussion boards and private chats calling them co-workers, classmates and friends. Several users who make videos by request said there's even a going rate: about $20 per fake.
"It's like an assault: the sense of power, the control," said Adam Dodge, the legal director of Laura's House, a domestic-violence shelter in California. Dodge hosted a training session last month for detectives and sheriff's deputies on how deepfakes could be used by an abusive partner or spouse. "With the ability to manufacture pornography, everybody is a potential target," Dodge said.
The media critic Anita Sarkeesian, who has been assailed online for her feminist critiques of pop culture and video games, was inserted into a hardcore porn video this year that has been viewed more than 30,000 times on the adult-video site Pornhub.
Sarkeesian said the deepfakes were more proof of "how terrible and awful it is to be a woman on the Internet, where there are all these men who feel entitled to women's bodies."
"For folks who don't have a high profile, or don't have any profile at all, this can hurt your job prospects, your interpersonal relationships, your reputation, your mental health," Sarkeesian said. "It's used as a weapon to silence women, degrade women, show power over women, reducing us to sex objects. This isn't just a fun-and-games thing. This can destroy lives."
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