Decider After Dark

Fake Celebrity Porn Is Taking Over The Internet And No One Is Safe

As if we needed more evidence that we’re living in an episode of Black Mirror, a new technology now allows users to face-swap porn stars with their favorite celebrities, creating fake porn that looks really, really real. As reported by Motherboard, the AI technology works like advanced Photoshop: users select a video of a celebrity and superimpose his or her face face onto the body of a porn star. The result makes it seem as if Daisy Ridley is speaking to the camera or if Jessica Alba is slowly taking off her clothes, and if done well, there’s no way to tell whether the video is real or not–whether it’s, shall we say, real or fake news.

The latest wave of fake celebrity porn started with a Redditor named ‘deepfakes’ (warning: link is extremely NSFW). In December, deepfakes posted several fake porn videos featuring Gal Gadot, Taylor Swift, and Maisie Williams that seriously impressed his fellow users and inspired them to give it a try on their own. More fake porn videos began popping up, and another user named ‘deepfakesapp’ created an app, FakeApp, that allows any user to create their own videos, provided that they know a little about programming. FakeApp is still fairly rudimentary, but deepfakesapp told Motherboard that they want to “streamline” the app to the point that users will eventually just “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.”

Of course, with an app like FakeApp, you don’t have to create porn. You can also superimpose one politician’s face onto another or re-create scenes from iconic movies, as one user did with Princess Leia’s appearance in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Everything becomes possible with some help from the AI-assisted technology.

The future is now, and it is frightening.

(via Motherboard)