Julia, 21, has received fake nude photos of herself generated by artificial intelligence. The phenomenon is exploding.
Julia, 21, has received fake nude photos of herself generated by artificial intelligence. The phenomenon is exploding.
"I'd already heard about deepfakes and deepnudes (...) but I wasn't really aware of it until it happened to me. It was a slightly anecdotal event that happened in other people's lives, but it wouldn't happen in mine", thought Julia, a 21-year-old Belgian marketing student and semi-professional model.
At the end of September 2023, she received an email from an anonymous author. Subject: "Realistic? "We wonder which photo would best resemble you", she reads.
Attached were five photos of her.
In the original content, posted on her social networks, Julia poses dressed. In front of her eyes are the same photos. Only this time, Julia is completely naked.
Julia has never posed naked. She never took these photos. The Belgian model realises that she has been the victim of a deepfake.
This is going to be a serious issue in the future - either society changes and these things are going to be accepted or these kind of generating ai models have to be banned. But that's still not going to be a "security" against it...
I also think we have to come up with digital watermarks that are easy to use...
Honestly, I see it as kinda freeing. Now people don't have to worry about nudes leaking any more, since you can just say they're fake. Somebody starts sending around deepfakes of me? OK, whatever, weirdo, it's not real.
Such an empty response. Do you know that women have to do things on dates out of fear of being killed? Literally they have a rational fear of being killed by their male dates and it’s a commonly known and accepted fear that many women relate.
Society moving forward is a nice idea, women feeling safe is much better one and attitudes like yours are part of the reason women generally do not feel safe. Deepfakes are not freeing at all.
I think there's a big difference between creating them and spreading them, and putting punishments on spreading nudes against someone's will, real or fake is a better 3rd option. The free speech implications of banning software that's capable of creating them is too broad and fuzzy, but I think that putting harsh penalties on spreading them on the grounds of harassment would be clear cut and effective. I didn't see a big difference in between spreading revenge porn and deep fakes and we already have laws against spreading revenge porn.
Why not blame the spread? You can't ban the tool, it's easily accessible software and that only requires easily accessible consumer hardware, and you can even semi easily train your own models using easily accessible porn on the Internet, so if you want to ban it outright, you'd need to ban the general purpose tool, all porn, and the knowledge to train image generation models. If you mean ban the online apps that sell the service on the cloud, I can get behind that, it would increase the bar to create them a little, but that is far from a solution.
But, we already have laws against revenge porn and Internet harassment. I think the better and more feasible approach that doesn't have far reaching free speech implications would be to simply put heavy penalties on spreading nudes images of people against their will, whether those images are real or fake. It's harassment as revenge porn, and I didn't see how it's different if it's a realistic fake. If there is major punishment for spreading these images then I think that will take care of discouraging the spread of the images for the vast majority of people.
The companies that host and sell an online image to nude service using a tuned version of that tool specifically designed to convert images into nudes are definitely a business model.
I agree it's impractical and opens dangerous free speech problems to try and ban or regulate the general purpose software, but, I don't have a problem with regulating for profit online image generation services that have been advertising the ability to turn images into nudes and have even been advertising their service on non porn sites. Regulating those will at least raise the bar a bit and ensure that there's isn't a for profit motive where capitalism will encourage it happening even more.
We already have revenge porn laws that outlaw the spread of real nudes against someone's will, I don't see why the spread of fakes shouldn't be outlaws similarly.
And I think if those companies can be identified as making the offending image, they should be help liable. IMO, you shouldn’t be able to use a photo without the permission of the person.
With ai and digital art... What is real? What is a person? What is a cartoon or a similar but not same likeness? In some cases what even is nudity? How old is an ai image? How can anything then be legal or illegal?