We all recently learned what fresh new horror our own technological advancements brought us: AI-assisted celebrity fake porn.
Yup, those words actually refer to a real phenomenon and aren’t just a random string of buzzy keywords. After a new kind of open-source AI technology was discovered by the folks over at Reddit, celebrity faces could be seamlessly superimposed onto already existing porn scenes. The subreddit where this kind of porn originated was called deepfakes, and the name became synonymous with the fake porn videos themselves: but now several social media and video platforms are working to put an end to the videos by banning them altogether.
The first two platforms to get their act together were chatroom site Discord and GIF hosting site and what would probably end up becoming a home for these videos, Pornhub. On Tuesday, Pornhub banned the videos in the grounds that they are “nonconsensual porn.”
“We do not tolerate any nonconsensual content on the site and we remove all said content as soon as we are made aware of it," a Pornhub spokesperson told Motherboard. "Nonconsensual content directly violates our terms of service and consists of content such as revenge porn, deepfakes or anything published without a person’s consent or permission.”
Social media platforms Twitter and Reddit have followed suit. Twitter told Motherboard that they would suspend any account that shares or is dedicated to sharing this kind of content. Twitter’s existing intimate media policy states that "you may not post or share intimate photos or videos of someone that were produced or distributed without their consent."
Reddit updated its rules to ban both “depictions that have been faked” as well as the posting of images “for the specific purpose of faking explicit content or soliciting ‘lookalike’ pornography.” Reddit has also banned subreddits that produced or shared the videos in question. This change comes after total silence from Reddit for weeks. In fact, the first deepfakes started popping up on Reddit in December, but Reddit has only taken action now, perVariety.
