Artificial intelligence is changing not only the way that people live, but also how they perceive the world around them. This is far more than Virtual Reality, but is all the way to creating images that look real but are not, so fiction becomes indistinguishable from reality. The technology is now developed to such a point that it is available for public use.
Where is this being used? In a phenomenon that began in 2017 and has since exploded, facial switching technology is being used to place the faces of famous movies stars and popular culture figures onto those of pornographic actors and actresses to people can “live out” their fantasies of watching their favorite celebrity have sex on camera:
In December, Motherboard discovered a redditor named ‘deepfakes’ quietly enjoying his hobby: Face-swapping celebrity faces onto porn performers’ bodies. He made several convincing porn videos of celebrities—including Gal Gadot, Maisie Williams, and Taylor Swift—using a machine learning algorithm, his home computer, publicly available videos, and some spare time.
Since we first wrote about deepfakes, the practice of producing AI-assisted fake porn has exploded. More people are creating fake celebrity porn using machine learning, and the results have become increasingly convincing. Another redditor even created an app specifically designed to allow users without a computer science background to create AI-assisted fake porn. All the tools one needs to make these videos are free, readily available, and accompanied with instructions that walk novices through the process.
These are developments we and the experts we spoke to warned about in our original article. They have arrived with terrifying speed.
Shortly after Motherboard published its story, deepfakes created a subreddit named after himself dedicated to his practice two months ago. In that short time, it has already amassed more than 15,000 subscribers. Within the community, the word “deepfake” itself is now a noun for the kinds of neural-network generated fake videos their namesake pioneered.
Another user, called ‘deepfakeapp,’ created FakeApp, a user-friendly application that allows anyone to recreate these videos with their own datasets. The app is based on deepfakes’ algorithm, but deepfakeapp created FakeApp without the help of the original deepfakes. I messaged deepfakes, but he didn’t respond to a request for comment on the newfound popularity of his creation.
Deepfakeapp told me in a Reddit direct message that his goal with creating FakeApp was to make deepfakes’ technology available to people without a technical background or programming experience.
“I think the current version of the app is a good start, but I hope to streamline it even more in the coming days and weeks,” he said. “Eventually, I want to improve it to the point where prospective users can simply 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.”
In early January, shortly after Motherboard’s first deepfakes story broke, I called Peter Eckersley, chief computer scientist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to talk about the implications of this technology on society at large: “I think we’re on the cusp of this technology being really easy and widespread,” he told me, adding that deepfakes were pretty difficult to make at the time. “You can make fake videos with neural networks today, but people will be able to tell that you’ve done that if you look closely, and some of the techniques involved remain pretty advanced. That’s not going to stay true for more than a year or two.”
In fact, that barely stayed true for two months. We counted dozens of users who are experimenting with AI-assisted fake porn, some of which have created incredibly convincing videos.
Redditor UnobtrusiveBot put Jessica Alba’s face on porn performer Melanie Rios’ body using FakeApp. “Super quick one – just learning how to retrain my model. Around 5ish hours – decent for what it is,” they wrote in a comment.
Fakes posted in the subreddit have already been pitched as real on other websites; a deepfake of Emma Watson taking a shower was reuploaded by CelebJihad—a celebrity porn site that regularly posts hacked celebrity nudes—as a “never-before-seen video above is from my private collection, and appears to feature Emma Watson fully nude and flaunting her naked sex organs while showering with another girl.”
Other redditors have taken video trained from celebrities’ public Instagram stories and used them to transfer faces onto nude Snapchats posted by amateurs: “I lucked out that this amateur does similar silly dancing moves and facial expressions as Chloe sometimes does in her instagram stories,” the creator of a deepfake of actress Chloe Bennet wrote.
Most of the posts in r/deepfakes so far are porn, but some users are also creating videos that show the far reaching implication of a technology that allows anyone with sufficient raw footage to work with to convincingly place any face in any video. A user named Z3ROCOOL22 combined footage of Hitler with Argentina’s president Mauricio Macri
According to deepfakeapp, anyone who can download and run FakeApp can create one of these videos with only one or two high-quality videos of the faces they want to fake. The subreddit’s wiki states that FakeApp is “a community-developed desktop app to run the deepfakes algorithm without installing Python, Tensorflow, etc.,” and that all one needs to run it is a “good GPU [graphics processing unit, the kind that high-end 3D video games require] with CUDA support [NVIDIA’s parallel computing platform and programming model].” If users don’t have the proper GPU, they can also rent cloud GPUs through services like Google Cloud Platform. Running the entire process, from data extraction to frame-by-frame conversion of one face onto another, would take about eight to 12 hours if done correctly. Other people have reported spending much longer, sometimes with disastrous results.
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The Princess Leia face swap from Rogue One by user derpfake stands out to deepfakeapp as particularly good, he told me. The FakeApp version and the Hollywood-produced scene from the actual film are nearly identical, at least in this low resolution gifs.
“My hope is that in the next few years machine learning tools like this one become more widely available and give everyday people that don’t necessarily know tech the opportunity to explore and create with the high-tech digital manipulation technology that’s mainly the domain of big-budget SFX companies today,” deepfakeapp told me.
“Top is original footage from Rogue One with a strange CGI Carrie Fisher. Movie budget: $200m,” derpfake wrote of his creation. “Bottom is a 20 minute fake that could have been done in essentially the same way with a visually similar actress. My budget: $0 and some Fleetwood Mac tunes.”
An incredibly easy-to-use application for DIY fake videos—of sex and revenge porn, but also political speeches and whatever else you want—that moves and improves at this pace could have society-changing impacts in the ways we consume media. The combination of powerful, open-source neural network research, our rapidly eroding ability to discern truth from fake news, and the way we spread news through social media has set us up for serious consequences.
“Socially and culturally, this is exploitative but quite survivable,” Jay Owens, digital media analyst and research director at audience intelligence platform Pulsar told me in an email. “Viral videos and celebrity media already operate on a plane of pure entertainment—but this’ll only get sexier and meme-ier and lulzier and ever-more unreal.”
Deborah Johnson, Professor Emeritus of Applied Ethics at the University of Virginia’s school of engineering, told me there’s no doubt this technology would get so good that it’d be impossible to tell the difference between an AI-generated face swap and the real thing.
“You could argue that what’s new is the degree to which it can be done, or the believability, we’re getting to the point where we can’t distinguish what’s real—but then, we didn’t before,” she said. “What is new is the fact that it’s now available to everybody, or will be… It’s destabilizing. The whole business of trust and reliability is undermined by this stuff.” (source)
We decided to investigate the trend further, so we went to Pornhub- the largest adult website in the world- to see based on this story what we could find. With some videos explicitly labeled as “fakes” or “deepfakes” and many others not, we found hundreds and possibly thousands of such videos, all with tends of thousands or more views.
We took some (censored) screenshots from a selection of these videos and have posted them below so you can have a look for yourself. We have listed the name of the celebrity whose face has been placed onto the porn actor below, but remember that all of these are FAKE FACE SWAPS- not even a substitute actor who looks like a celebrity, but an outright face swap:
“Emma Watson”
“Maisie Williams”
“Natalie Portman”
“Scarlett Johansson”
Most of these videos are fairly well done. There are some on the site too that are clearly of lower quality, but these are a LOT harder to tell who is real and who is fake, especially at first appearance. The biggest giveaway to them is that for the current time, when something external touches an area which has been substituted by AI, it appears to go “through” them.
But it is not just celebrities on major porn websites. Not to be outdone, posters at 4Chan have been experimenting with this on one of the women both loathed and fetishized by women on the “Politically Incorrect” board (also known as /pol/), Lauren Southern. Some people have taken the time to make similar porngraphic films, except instead of using movies, they used repeating GIF files with AI programs to give the impression that Lauren Southern is producing more than just videos about ethnonationalism:
So who cares about people making fake pornographic movies? People have always had perverse inclinations, and it should not come as a surprise that men would attempt to project their fantasies about celebrities as close to reality as possible if they are so inclined. There have always been rubber blow-up cheap and poorly similar replications of all major celebrities and many public figures, including Presidents Obama and Trump, into sex dolls. There are even more realistic dolls for sale in figures such as Taylor Swift. According to a major manufacturer, he gets many requests for celebrity sex dolls, the largest of which is that for Marilyn Monroe. There is even the case of a Chinese engineer by the name of Ricky Ma who famously designed a Scarlett Johansson look-a-like sex doll for his personal use that made international headlines as he spend $50,000 USD of his own money to build it:
A humanoid obsessive has built an incredibly realistic female robot from scratch – and it’s got more than a passing resemblance to Avengers star Scarlett Johansson.
Ricky Ma, a 42-year-old product and graphic designer, has spent more than $50,000 (£34,000) and a year and a half creating the female robot prototype, Mark 1.
The designer confirmed the scarily lifelike humanoid had been modelled on a Hollywood star, but wanted to keep her name under wraps.
It responds to a set of programmed verbal commands spoken into a microphone and has moving facial expressions, but Ricky says creating it wasn’t easy.
He said he was not aware of anyone else in Hong Kong building humanoid robots as a hobby and that few in the city understood his ambition.
Ricky said: “When I was a child, I liked robots. Why? Because I liked watching animation. All children loved it. There were Transformers, cartoons about robots fighting each other and games about robots.
“After I grew up, I wanted to make one. But during this process, a lot of people would say things like, ‘Are you stupid? This takes a lot of money. Do you even know how to do it? It’s really hard’.”
Besides movements of its arms and legs, turning its head and bowing, Ma’s robot, with blonde hair and hazel eyes can form detailed facial expressions.
Ricky has dressed ‘her’ in a crop top and a grey skirt.
In response to the compliment, “Mark 1, you are so beautiful”, the robot bows as the ‘muscles’ around its eyes relax and corners of its lips lift, forming a smile.
It then replies: “Hehe, thank you.” (source)
People who have sexual fantasies about or involving celebrities are serious. Even if one does not have an explicitly sexual approach, the sexual undertones are always present. One does not need to look further than not even celebrities, but the American conservative movement. I mentioned Lauren Southern above, as that is who I was able to find with a pornographic film face swap. However, the sexualization which caused men to make such films with her in them is present for any major female public figure. It could be Faith Goldy, Brittany Pettibone, Prissy Holly, a news anchor (such as with the infamous Fox News women), or another, for the American conservative movement has mastered the use of pretty women as honeypots to attract men like flies to listen to the ideas the propagate, whether or not the women themselves actually believe in them. This is one way in which the liberal movement has absolutely failed because, without attempting to sound needlessly disgusting but getting to the reality of what one is witnessing, what semi-not-completely degenerate man is going to have masturbatory thoughts watching Rachel Maddow’s face when there is Tomi Lahren to look at?
Tomi Lahren verus Rachel Maddow. Both are news anchors with major news broadcasting companies, yet whose viewership is better? It is Tomi Lahren, and not because of her intellect, but because she looks good.
Lindsay Lowery, a.k.a. “Prissy Holly” from the Prissy Holly Show versus Amy Goodman from Democracy Now. Which one do you think men send messages to on Facebook (if you go to their respective pages) saying PLS MARY ME I LUV U? Or which continually say YOU ARE SO BEAUTIFUL to who? Likewise, while Amy Goodman is nationally syndicated and has been around for many, many years, yet Prissy Holly has not and is essentially self-made and runs her own one-woman operation, how does the audience differ between the two?
And lastly, Faith Goldy of the “alt-right” versus Louise Rosealma, a.k.a. “Moldylocks” who became famous after getting punched in the face by Nathan Damigo at a Berkeley, CA protest with Antifa. Faith Goldy portrays herself as the traditional girl interlaced with 14/88 and not to mention some very attractive physical features. Moldylocks does cheap “hairy” porn shoots for ATKHairy.com and dances around in the desert almost naked with devil horns on her head for pagan rituals (go look at her Twitter account photos). Again, which one is more attractive to an “average” man, particularly judged by public recognition?
This is a reality of not just politics, but life as well. One might have brilliant ideas to consider, and perhaps once upon a time in a different society with a different standard of behavior, what works today would utterly fail in those places. But given that the world is soaked in sexual immorality, that reason is continually and consistently given over to the better looking or one who can better channel the fantasies of its viewers whether they are real or not, the way to gain followers quickly and keep them is to have interesting content that is wrapped in a really attractive package that stimulates the basest impulses of man, and after eating fat, salt, and sugar, what is a baser impulse than pretty women in tight clothing with emphasis on certain body parts?
Sex sells. It always sells because men always want to “get laid.” This is the reason why even a horrendously ugly woman can still have intercourse with a man but a man will not necessarily have intercourse with a woman, because a woman’s drive for sexual relations is internally driven while a man’s is externally driven. If a man is “thirsty” enough and if there is no moral barriers to obstruct his behavior that he wishes to hold to, if even a woman he finds horrendous comes to him and offers sex, he will accept simply to relieve his “thirst”. It is rarely the opposite case for women, and for women sex is often used as a “bargaining chip” to get something such as access to resources from a man. The conservative movement has mastered the embrace and channeling of this natural male impulse to promote their message, for behind a large number of the male viewers of these shows are single men who are projecting their fantasies onto the women speaking and by watching them are being indoctrinated into the ideas that are being told to them.
Since sex is such an effective tool for manipulating people and society, it is of more importance to pay attention to the sex robots as well as different forms of A.I., because there is seldom a more effective way of selling an idea to the public if it means being able for them to live out very deep, personal fantasies that would be difficult or impossible for them to do so otherwise. A combination of robotics, AI, and eventually biotechnology will allow men to live out something they have always dreamed of throughout history, which is the creation of a “Stepford wife”- a woman who will be perfectly fitted to their personality and desires without all of the obstacles caused by normal human relations between men and women as well as those inculcated in men but particularly women by the culture.
If you went to a man and told him that he could have a woman that he could custom design to her beauty standards, would he take it? Add to that not only beauty, but her personality and disposition would match and be unquestioningly submissive to his desires and demands. It would not have menstrual cycles or headaches, it would not have emotional outbursts, and it would not have hissy fits. If he got tired of it he could turn it off, and he would not have to buy food for it because it does not need to eat. He could throw her away and buy a new one. Best of all, it would always agree with him. What man would not want such, and if was possible, would he not be willing to spend a fortune to realize such a fantasy?
That is why there is such a drive for the robots and AI- because they represent the realization of a fantasy in the same way that the face-swapping technology is so popular with celebrity faces and pornographic videos. It allows for men to project their internal desires into something external in a way that could not be done before.
But make no mistake, this is not something good. To the contrary, this is something very evil and disturbing that will open up the possibility for abuse and horrors only written about in science fiction stories. This is because robots are essentially surrogate humans, possessing all of the physical capabilities of human beings and able to do them quicker and more perfectly as they are machines, but without a soul and as such the ability to reproduce. Robots will bring about the formal death of marriage as an institution in society because they will make the line between man and machine both indistinguishable as well as strip a desire for marriage with women from men because if a man can get his “needs” “satisfied” by a machine, what incentive is there for him to be with a woman other than for bearing children, which would be strictly by choice and most likely owing to religious reasons? It will naturally cause a decline in birthrates around the world as well. Since robots are surrogate humans that do not have a soul, one must also leave open the possibility that men with evil ideas will attempt to use rituals to attach spirits to these robots in the same tradition of paganism throughout history, except instead of a possessed idol or statue, it will be a full-scale robot.
It will also lead to a massive increase in crime and the conviction of the innocent for crimes they did not commit.
Let’s go back to this entire debacle about AI and the porn video face swapping it now can do and will improve upon. Porn is the “sweet” side of the discussion- it’s the selling point meant to entice you, John Q. Public, to accept and want to embrace further innovation into this technology.
But what happens outside of porn? What are the applications outside of one’s lusts?
If you have ever watched a show such as “Cops” or any other “live action police” type show, criminals often who are caught in the middle of committing a crime will say they are innocent and “I didn’t do anything.” However, the people who are caught always get convicted and the proof that the people are guilty in such cases is due to VIDEO evidence. Without the video, many times these criminals (regardless of race) would not be caught because it would become a case of “he-said-she-said.” The video is what is used to convict these people in court because it provides incontrovertible evidence of their actions versus their stories. In some cases, video is used to exonerate people accused of crimes because if clearly a person said he is not at a certain location and he is not, then he did not do the crime.
This is now permanently changed due to this AI program. Again, I emphasize that the program is still in its infancy stages of use, but the fact is that given how effective it already is and that it is being used for pornography, the technology is going to improve and will be driven by the lusts of men. So what will this look like? It is very possible that instead of programs such as Valcri, which are marketed as the “AI solution” to solving crimes, the opposite may be true, which is that AI could enable the expansion of crimes by the forging of video evidence in a way that will be available to all people, from the man-on-the-street to the upper levels of government, that has never existed before.
Consider a situation where there is a video of an actual crime that takes place. What is to stop a man who gets his hands on this facial swapping technology from placing the face of, say, somebody he does not like or is having a personal feud with onto the face of the perpetrator? He could say “I didn’t do anything,” but the video evidence will prove him otherwise.
What about false crimes? For example, somebody sets up a camera in an area and then films himself “committing a crime” against his own property, and then just swaps the face of somebody he has a grudge against onto his? It’s a very convenient way to destroy somebody’s life in a cruel act of revenge that, if it was done well, serve as incontrovertible evidence in court as “evidence” of a crime that will be used to convict a man of guilt regardless if he says “I didn’t do anything.”
Now one might say that the police will be able to use digital forensics to detect if an alteration has been made. This might work for early stages, but given how fast technology is advancing particularly with AI and how scientists admit they don’t understand how AI works, what is to say that it will not reach such a point that it will be nearly impossible to tell if forged evidence is actually forged without considerable, concentrated work on a project, perhaps more work than a defense attorney team will be able to have the time or money to afford to do?
Now this is just for “simple” crimes. What if this were to be taken to another level of severity? Say, for example, of that of a foreign nation, where using advanced AI technology, a man can give the appearance that a foreign leader is speaking and giving commands or making statements against another nations that could cause a war, when the reality is otherwise?
If that concept is not disturbing enough, it is even more disturbing that such a warning has already happened:
Watch the video above.
It is very popular to call news that somebody does not like FAKE NEWS.
This is not fake news. This is the enabling of the creation of actual fake news on a level that has never been possible.
The video speaks of such facial manipulation technology will be used to better “movie dubbing technology.”
Do you really believe that? Especially after showing images of Putin, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump “saying” words they never said because it is somebody else speaking?
Osama bin Laden. If this technology is being released now, it likely existed years ago. Was it used in some of the so-called “broadcasts” by bin Laden?
While we cannot say for sure, in a world where evidence can be manufactured, anything is possible.
“Movie dubbing,” just like pornography, will be at best a secondary concern used to sell the use of such technology to the public. The reality is that this will be used for psychological manipulation and the execution of particular foreign policy goals by the manufacturing of evidence to serve the ends of particular groups in finance and industry.
Both issues related to the forging of evidence, from the common man’s inability now to say “I didn’t do anything” to the supposed “incontrovertible” evidence showing world leaders making claims that lead to political instability, is an undermining of public trust in the veracity of evidence, and this is the most dangerous change.
All societies are based upon trust. People cannot have any kind of relationship with each other if they cannot trust each other. In the most basic sense, if a man does not trust his neighbor for his physical safety, he cannot and will not be able to speak with or exchange goods with him. Instead he will remain in a state of conflict against him for the sake of his own safety. It is if there is a sense of trust that exists between them that they can talk, and then begin to exchange goods. This exchange leads to the foundation of an economy, and out of the economic exchange between people does the discussion of ideas and rules emerge, which could be defined as the formation of policy or what we call, politics. Politics follows economy, and economy comes from the establishment of some kind of trust-based relationship between peoples. Without that fundamental trust, there is NO society. If this is taken to a great enough extent, there are not even tribes, but only individuals living in perpetual fear and conflict with each other.
There are many ways to break down trust in a society, but what is a more effective way to accomplish this goal than to simply destroy people’s ability to believe in long-established forms of evidence used for proving the innocence or guilt of an accused party? While it is true that forms of evidence and even times change, the fact is that the human race is at a point where no camera will suffice to serve as an objective third-party arbiter of evidence because the cameras will be able to lie in court without consequence. The result will be, barring further evidence that would indicate otherwise, a return to the he-said-she-said mentality that characterizes the tribalism found in many societies around the world. If taken far enough, it can and will result in the wholescale breakdown of society because nobody will be able to be trusted any more unless there was more than one physical person to serve as a witness.
Muslim nations are often criticized, and rightly so, for the Koranic ability to forge evidence. This is particularly so in the case of “rape” charges, where the testimony of four Muslim male witnesses overrides all other testimony given. As such, Muslim men who actually do commit rape are known to get four friends to say “he did nothing,” and the testimony is automatically shifted to his favor even though he is the perpetrator.
Islam is an evil religion that enables the worst of human nature, but human nature does not change, and is not conditional upon Islam to operate. As such the same evils of the Muslim world regarding false evidence could come to the Western world but in a different and more efficient context, for whereas the Muslims merely have to say that “this is true,” the forging of actual evidence provides the appearance of a much more “airtight” case. In both cases, the loser is truth.
Pornography is often times a vehicle of social policy that indicates the direction which society is moving towards. This includes everything from trends to technology, for human beings will surely ask two questions whenever a new idea comes into their midst- can I get personal pleasure from it, and can I use it to kill somebody I hate?
This function of AI does both, and it is just the beginning. For if truth is no longer the standard by which right and wrong can be measured, and since all societies need a standard, it will have to be rooted in the will of the powerful to decree right from wrong regardless of evidence, and that never has a good end, as every dictatorship throughout history’s pages will recall.
Aldous Huxley warned about the coming of a “brave new world” in his famous novel and the horrors it would bring.
Yet we don’t have to wait for Huxley anymore, because it has already arrived.