Martin Scorcese’s most recent film, The Irishman, told a story that spanned seven decades. Robert Di Niro and Joe Pesci starred, and in order to “de-age” them, Scorcese used a special three-rig camera and employed dedicated special effects artists for post-production work. The costs ran into the millions — and the results were patchy. Earlier this year, a YouTuber decided to see if he could do any better: using free artificial intelligence software, he bettered Scorcese’s attempt in a week.
It is no exaggeration to say that soon almost everything we see or hear online will be synthetic — that is, generated or manipulated by AI. Machines that can “learn” to do almost anything when ‘trained’ on the right data — and they’ve never had access to more data, nor so much power to churn through it all. Some experts estimate that within 5-7 years, 90% of all video content online will be synthetic. Before long, anyone with a smartphone will be able to make Hollywood level AI-generated content.
One synthetic-text generating model can already generate articles that appear to have been written by a human. AI can be trained to clone someone’s voice even if they’re already dead: an old recording of JFK’s voice has been used to make a clip of the former president reading the Book of Genesis. AI trained on a dataset of human faces can generate convincing fake images of people who do not exist, and it can be taught to insert people into photographs and videos they were not originally in. One YouTuber is working on a project to insert actor Nicholas Cage into every movie ever made.
All this sounds weird at worst and hilarious at best, but this technology has a dark side. It will, inevitably, be misused, and for that most obvious of male-driven reasons. It was reported last week that the messaging app Telegram is hosting a “deepfake pornography bot,” which allows users to generate images of naked women. According to the report, there are already over 100,000 such images being circulated in public Telegram channels; considering that they are almost certainly being shared privately too, the actual number in existence is likely much higher. The women who appear to feature in this cache of publicly-shared fake porn are mostly private individuals rather than celebrities. More disturbingly, the images also include deepfake nudes of underage girls.
Henry Ajder, the lead author of the report, told me that “the discovery of the bot and its surrounding ecosystem was a disturbing, yet sadly unsurprising, confirmation that the creation and sharing of malicious deepfakes is growing rapidly.” When he wrote to Telegram to request a takedown, he “received no response”. The bot and the fake pornography — including that of minors — is still live at time of writing.
Deepfake pornography first emerged less than three years ago, when an anonymous user started posting it on Reddit. He later revealed his methodology: he was using open-source AI software to insert celebrity faces into pornographic films, by training AI on images and videos of his intended target. The end result was surprisingly convincing. When other Redditors started making their own deepfake pornography and news of this AI-assisted community broke to the world, there was a furore: Reddit shut down the community and banned deepfake pornography. But the genie was out of the bottle.
Since its early days on Reddit, an entire deepfake pornography ecosystem has developed online. With a few clicks, it is possible to access deepfake pornography of every (female) celebrity imaginable, from Ivanka Trump and Michelle Obama to Ann Coulter. And celebrities are not the only targets. AI can clone any woman: all that is needed is some training data, and the rapid acceleration of the technology means that less and less training data is required. These days a single picture, a few seconds of a voice recording, or a single video would be enough.
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