On a busy workday in March, 28-year-old Kate felt an urgent tap on her shoulder. Her colleague wanted to show her a video, so she glanced at his computer and was shocked to see her own face staring back, wincing and moaning. She appeared on-screen to be lying naked on a couch with her legs in the air while a man repeatedly penetrated her.
Kate felt sick. Her co-workers, who’d gathered around to see what was going on, instantly fell silent when they saw the video. It looked real and even identified Kate by name, but she knew it couldn’t be. Beyond the obvious — she’d never done porn — she could tell it wasn’t her body; only the face was hers. It had to be some kind of hoax… but would other people believe it?
“It was horrifying,” Kate, who lives in Texas, told HuffPost. “I’d never seen anything like it.”
The video, which is still online and has tens of thousands of views, is a deepfake — a doctored video created with artificial-intelligence software that can make someone appear to do or say anything. Deepfake algorithms use a dataset of videos and images of an individual to create a virtual model of their face that can be superimposed and manipulated. In Kate’s case, her face was swapped onto a porn actress’ head.
“When it’s Photoshop, it’s a static picture and can be very obvious that it’s not real,” said Kate, who’s been the target of previous misogynistic attacks. “But when it’s your own face reacting and moving, there’s this panic that you have no control over how people use your image.”
At first, deepfake porn almost exclusively featured female celebrities; their television and movie appearances gave video creators plenty of material to work with. But now, as the technology has advanced and become more broadly accessible, ordinary women with even a small selection of public photos or videos of themselves are being targeted too.
HuffPost spoke to six women who have been digitally inserted into porn without their consent. Those quoted here are identified by pseudonyms to protect their privacy, and are speaking out to call attention to an issue that’s been left to fester in the shadows.
Most public discussion on deepfakes thus far has centered on the potential political problems they could cause in the future, even though they already pose a real threat to women. Lawmakers have fretted about how the videos could hypothetically make a presidential candidate appear to say something defamatory on the eve of next year’s election. Satirical deepfakes of actor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg have recently dominated headlines as warnings of what’s to come.
Meanwhile, as deepfake porn continues to upend women’s lives, there’s been little media coverage, and there still exists no criminal recourse for victims.
“The harm done to women when it comes to this kind of sexual objectification is happening now,” said Mary Anne Franks, a law professor at the University of Miami and president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative. “It’s almost like people have forgotten that this is what this technology really started out as, and the conversation around women has fallen away.”
Deepfakes Are Rooted In Misogyny
Deepfakes have been weaponized against women for as long as they’ve existed. The term “deepfake” was coined in 2017 by an anonymous Reddit user who shared doctored porn videos like the one above, which portrays “Wonder Woman” star Gal Gadot. Today, major porn websites are filled with deepfakes, despite promises to ban them. (MindGeek, which owns Pornhub and other erotic video sites, did not respond to repeated requests for comment about the no-deepfakes policy it announced more than a year ago.)
Other tech platforms have wavered in their approach to deepfakes hosted on their sites, torn between calls to stamp out disinformation and to protect free expression. Inside the federal government, legislators have started to sound the alarm about the videos, and a few have introduced bills to regulate them, such as the DEEPFAKES Accountability Act from Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.). But so far, none have resulted in action.
“Once something is uploaded it can never really get deleted. It will just be reposted forever.”
- Tina, a victim of nonconsensual deepfake porn
Without any such intervention or effective policies in place, deepfake porn has carved out a comfortable space online — and it’s thriving. In addition to free, easy-to-use deepfake generator apps, there are now photo search engines (which HuffPost won’t name) that allow people to upload pictures of individuals to find porn actresses with similar features for optimal face-swapping results. There are even deepfake porn forums where men make paid requests for professional-looking videos of specific women, and share links to the women’s social media profiles for source imagery. HuffPost has observed requesters seeking porn with female Twitch, YouTube and Instagram influencers, as well as the requesters’ own co-workers, friends and exes.
On one such forum in March, someone asked for a sex video of Tina, a 24-year-old Canadian woman, and dropped a link to her YouTube channel. Four days later, a deepfake popped up that appeared to show her bent over naked on a bed with one man thrusting behind her and another stroking his penis near her head. The video, which is virtually seamless, is still up with thousands of views.
“I was definitely shocked and disturbed,” Tina, who learned of the video when an acquaintance sent her a link, told HuffPost. “It felt really weird and gross to see my face where it shouldn’t be.”
The video poster and claimed creator is a middle-aged man, according to his profile. Tina has no idea who he is. She thought about trying to get the video taken down, but didn’t see a point once she realized it had already been shared to other websites.
“You know how the internet is — once something is uploaded it can never really get deleted,” she said. “It will just be reposted forever.”
It Could Happen To Anyone
Until recently, convincing, deepfake-style video manipulation could only be done by highly skilled editors. Hollywood filmmakers have digitally inserted actors into movies posthumously, for example, which required a considerable amount of footage of the actors’ faces to work with. Now, rapidly advancing technology has democratized this kind of deceptive video-editing practice at women’s expense. We’ve reached a point where even amateurs with relatively few pictures of their target’s face can create deepfake porn on their own.
One self-proclaimed video creator, who describes himself online as a 25-year-old Greek man and “one of the first guys” to make deepfake porn, solicits donations and paid requests on multiple forums. People have watched his videos more than 300,000 times.
Deepfakes are “no different from a photoshop manipulation or artist drawing/rendering,” the man, who did not reveal his name, told HuffPost. Asked if anyone ever requests that he remove the sex videos he uploads, he replied: “There are no takedowns.”
Despite his disregard for women’s privacy, he seems rather concerned with protecting his own: “I’m accepting payments in bitcoin and other crypto currencies (no paypal/credit card due to privacy reasons),” he wrote in one post. In another, he listed his price range as around $15 to $40 per video.