“Deepfake pornography is a growing cause of gender-based harassment online and is increasingly used to target, silence and intimidate women — both on and offline,” Meta Oversight Board Co-Chair Helle Thorning-Schmidt said in a statement.
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I think that there’s an argument for taking the opposite position. If someone could make deepfake porn trivially and it were just all over the place, nobody would care about it; one knows that it’s fake.
In fact, it’d kind of make leaked actual pornography no-impact as a side effect, unless there were a way to distinguish distinguish between deepfakes. And that’s a harder issue to resolve. I was reading a discussion yesterday about sextortion on here and talking about how technically-difficult it would be to keep someone from recording sex video chats, that there’d always be an analog hole at least. But…there is another route to solve that, which is simply to make such a video valueless because there’s a flood of generated video.
Deep fake recognition is already available. And, while what you predict sounds logical, these criminals prey on emotions. I feel that a lot of innocent people will be victimized even if deep fake porn becomes common.
This is why we should be making laws around likeness rights. If you damage somebody by publicly using their name to spread falsehoods, that’s defamation or libel. But, if you produce an image or video of their likeness instead of using their name, there’s no legal recourse. Makes no sense this day in age
Who decides how similar somebody is “allowed” to look to another? There are people who bear an uncanny resemblance to others. And what of identical twins? Can one sue the other if they do porn?
I wonder what happens when it just accidentally looks like someone but was intended to be a fictional person. Also, how much can you base it on a real person before it’s considered a deep fake of that person? Would race-swapping be enough to make it a “new” person so it’s not illegal anymore? My intuition is that just eye colour or something wouldn’t be enough, but it’s a sliding scale where the line must be drawn somewhere even if it’s a fuzzy line.
What about an AI generated mashup of two people like those “what the child would look like” pictures back in the day. Does that violate both people or neither?
What about depicting a person older than they are now? That’s technically not somebody that exists, but might in the future.
What if you use AI but make it look like it’s hand-drawn or a cartoon?
What if you use AI to create sexual voice clips of a real person but use images that don’t look like them or no image at all?
There are just so many possibilities and questions that I feel it might be impossible to legislate in a way that isn’t always 10 steps behind or has a million unforeseen consequences.
There’s already laws against using someone’s likeness for commercial purposes without their consent, I’m guessing this will require the same fuzzy cutoff and basically just be up to the jury to decide or the judge to dismiss.
Could be very lucrative if you are already in porn and want to make some money from your likeness. This guy’s gonna pay me $500 to make a video and I don’t even have to do anything?
Could also be very good for porn stars who have “aged out” but can still make videos using their younger bodies as weird as that may be.
I can imagine a non-zero amount of people would consent to a deep-fake porn video of themselves having sex with some generic hot woman, just as one example.
I have a hard time accepting this as a crime. What if the illustration hand-drawn, or clothed but still sexual in character? Is caricature illegal, by this standard?
So if I use AI to make pornography of 50 men gang banging you, you will consider that to be on the same level as going to a carnival and getting a characture done?
You can jerk off to photos of people, you can imagine some wild things involving other people etc.
If you just create some deepfake porn to masturbate by yourself to, I don’t see a big problem with that.
The only issue I can find is, that due to neglect someone else sees it, or even hears about it.
The problem starts with sharing. Like it would be sexual harassment to tell people who you are masturbating to, especially sharing with the “actors” of your fantasies.
There is however another way this could go:
Everyone can now share nudes with way less risk.
If anyone leaks them, just go: “That’s a deepfake. This is obviously a targeted attack by the heathens of the internet, who are jealous of my pure and upstanding nature. For me only married missionary with lights out.”
I understand this won’t be a popular statement, but to me, it falls under I know it when I see it.
I don’t know the exact location of the line, but there is no artistic, scientific, or any other kind of merit to someone making deepfake nudes of a 14 year old and circulating them around school. The victim comes first in these cases. I don’t want to debate what is or isn’t child porn. I think we all agree this girl was a victim and this should never have happened.
To get away from the minors-argument: it’s just like how I can’t go around shooting photos of random people when they’re naked and then circulate them. Hell you can barely do that even if they aren’t naked except in particular circumstances where consent to be photographed is taken as a given.
Non-consensual deepfakes should, by and large, not be allowed.
Deepfakes are already so good in many cases that the differences are basically trivial. The gulf between writing and committing murder is far wider. Not a great parallel IMO.
How would you feel if someone spread nude deepfakes of you? Your partner? Your child? Are you telling me that’s just like writing about doing something and not closer to committing the act and you’d just shrug and move on with your life?
Deepfakes are already so good in many cases that the differences are basically trivial.
Then if anything it gives deniability to real nudes. “It wasn’t me, it’s fake!”
How would you feel if someone spread nude deepfakes of you? Your partner? Your child? Are you telling me that’s just like writing about doing something and not closer to committing the act and you’d just shrug and move on with your life?
It depends. There’s already a legal framework for defamation, so if the deepfake is made public and has a negative impact on me I can use that avenue. Simply making the deepfake, though, is akin to drawing me naked (not that anyone wound want to do that). It’s deeply weird but should not be illegal IMO.
It’s not about deniability. I don’t want incredibly photorealistic nudes of me or my family spreading around with little to no consequences. I certainly don’t want to get into prolonged court battles over it. Why does somebody’s unfettered use of AI trump my dignity as a person? We have restrictions on photography and video baked into our legal framework. Why should this be any different?
I can’t imagine you would be so flippant if this was happening to you.
How is a paper facsimile generated with glass and light any more or less real than a near-duplication in a digital format? You are splitting hairs here. If the average person essentially can’t distinguish between a deep fake and a “real“ photo or agrees it is sufficiently similar for their purposes than it’s moot. Your argument hinges on whether or not something is “real“ and that is not a prior that most people agree with, nor is it a scientific or otherwise objective/measurable benchmark. You can’t just vacillate between science-y sounding responses and opinions like that.
There are deep fakes that look more “real” than some old photos. Where does that factor into this?
I’m being dead serious here when I ask: what constitutes “real”? Because that seems to be doing a lot of heavy lifting in your responses. And I don’t really see that word tossed around much in legal frameworks that’s for sure, certainly not as you seem to be using it. I’ve been in the visual/audio media industry for 15 years and I can tell you that your lines in the sand are yours and yours alone. The thousands of releases I’ve been responsible for over the course of my career make that pretty obvious.
I’m being dead serious here when I ask: what constitutes “real”? Because that seems to be doing a lot of heavy lifting in your responses.
That seems pretty obvious to me: a capture of a person’s actual body, rather than a fabrication based on other source materials or created out of whole cloth. I’m not sure what your counterpoint might be. Do you consider CGI to be “real”?
If you generate a deepfake it's based on information garnered from the person's actual body/face/etc. How is that any different? None of what you are describing is particularly distinguishing or measurable and I'm still failing to see where "real" falls here. If you use my face to generate a fake, because you have to use an image of my face to make that happen which according to you is "real," how is that functionally any different? You're still using my "real" image or whatever.
This reads to me like...I don't know, if I right click a photo and choose "duplicate" on my computer then I've no longer got the "real" image. Because it's "new" pixels not comprised of the original. You are trivializing the source of the image, aka a person.
If you generate a deepfake it’s based on information garnered from the person’s actual body/face/etc. How is that any different?
Because it isn’t their actual face or body. I’m not sure what’s so complicated about what I’m saying. A photo or video is 100% accurate representation of a person, capturing their actual face/body at a real moment in time. A deepfake or CGI model or painting or charcoal drawing is not a capture of their actual face/body but merely a creative reproduction or interpolation.
This reads to me like…I don’t know, if I right click a photo and choose “duplicate” on my computer then I’ve no longer got the “real” image. Because it’s “new” pixels not comprised of the original. You are trivializing the source of the image, aka a person.
A photo or video is 100% accurate representation of a person
That's a pretty decisive statement considering it's been a core debate since the moment the first daguerreotype was captured and no one has conclusively answered it. If I use an 8mm lens is that an accurate representation of you? No, the lens by its very nature is distorting.
I have to use an image of you to generate a deep fake. You are the source. A photo of you, which again is somehow "real" according to you, is the required source to make this work. It is not like using a photo to paint a portrait. The distinction here should be obvious, if for no other reason than the end goal is an image indistinguishable from a “real” photograph or video.
Again you constantly jump between philosophical and measurable definitions. Your argument hinges on some notion of the "truth of the photograph," which is not a given in the slightest. And at the end of the day, that 14 year old student in Spain was harassed by her classmates in an absolutely vile, fucked up way that is only possible through the use of her "real" image. You need to take a step back and realize what corner you are standing in here. This is not some academic debate, this is real shit with real consequences. Hiding behind some arbitrary line of what constitutes a "real" image does not suddenly make this problem go away. I mean what are you even fighting for here? The right to depict anyone in any way to a mass audience with impunity? As if revenge porn wasn't a big enough issue already.
If someone takes a ton of photos of you and uses it to make a convincing deepfake of your kid(s) having sex or otherwise nude I have a feeling you're going to take this matter a lot more seriously. And make no mistake, that shit is already happening. Because kids can be absolutely horrific to each other. I don't even want to google what adults are doing.
I already addressed how the existing legal framework is able to deal with this. Defamation and blackmail are very well-established legal concepts.
As for the rest, it’s clear to me that this discussion is going nowhere and I have no interest in continuing it. I can’t argue with someone who believes an artwork based off a photo is exactly the same as a photo.
If they’re going to go this way, I don’t think it should be limited to just porn. There are plenty of ways you could ruin someone’s life without a deepfake being sexually explicit.
There already are a lot of laws covering that. This one is to cover an additional angle where people create deepfake without provably publishing it, the intent being that showing it to friends and verbally threatening to “leak” them should be easier to prosecute.
If you create a deepfake and share it, you’re slapped with two crimes.
Using a mobile phone while driving has always been illegal if you could argue that it was dangerous driving or driving without due care and attention. They made a law specifically saying that using a mobile phone without hands free is illegal anyway. This makes it easier to prosecute because you don’t need to argue that they were driving dangerously or without due care.
I imagine that this law has the same intent of making this specific act illegal to prevent them having to argue that it fits another crime.
Yeah the way people can recreate someone “in need of assistance” to trick family or associates is really scary especially for people who aren’t exactly tech savvy. That seems to me to be a worse crime than an explicit video that is pretty obviously doctored
This is what frustrates me so much about AI evangelists. They really do not give a shit about consequences. And then if you raise even the slightest concern, they call you a Luddite and paint you as somebody who is technophobic or otherwise small minded. God forbid we anticipate or otherwise try to deal with the myriad of consequences this tech is unleashing and will unleash.
I use AI tools every single day in my work. I have for years, pre-ChatGPT. They can be amazing and have made my video/audio editing pipeline so much better than it was even four or five years ago. But I don’t let it blind me to the real world harms these incredibly accessible tools can enable.
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