There’s a video on the internet of Daisy Ridley’s ‘sex tape’ and it’s going viral, yet the truth behind it is much more sinister than you might have imagined.
We now live in an age where privacy is almost a distant memory, especially for celebrities, even more so for female celebrities.
After the mass iCloud hack from a few years ago, celebrities’ most intimate pictures and videos have been shared online as though they are anything other than a perverted invasion of someone’s privacy.
Now, the trend is going one step further and shutting out the need for the celebrity to have even participated in the production of these images and videos in the first place.
Initially reported by Motherboard in December, a Reddit user named ‘deepfakes’ had quietly begun face-swapping celebrity faces onto the bodies of adult performers using a terrifyingly realistic algorithm.
The trend has become even more prevalent online, with a subreddit being created just for the sole purpose of helping new users get to grips with the technologies available to create your own videos.
The videos are known as ‘deepfakes’ – after the Reddit user’s name who’s credited with the original creation of Gal Gadot’s video.
The ‘deepfake’ subreddit now has 15,000 subscribers and another user has created an app, (which is user-friendly) and allows those who don’t know how to code, to do the same thing as the experts.
Motherboard spoke to the creator of the app, who said:
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.
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.
An expert also told Motherboard this technology was on the cusp of becoming widespread and mainstream, saying it would only take one or two years for this to be readily accessible to everyone.
In fact, this didn’t take much longer than two months and now, people are ‘deepfaking’ celebrities in greater number.
There’ve been people using images of Jessica Alba and Alison Brie, among others, and the implications are quite terrifying.
Think of a world in which the consent of a person is revoked for the distribution of their image to the extent they never even have to be in the image in the first place.
Couple this with the fact the images are exclusively sexual in nature and you have an abhorrent trend on your hands.
Unfortunately, it asks the question, what else did you really expect from the internet and technology in the modern day?
