We have been talking about AI taking over the world and destroying the human race with military weapons, but nobody has ever thought about AI falling into the wrong hands and emotionally hurting individuals.

If you have seen Fast and Furious 7, you must know about the film’s climax scene — the late Paul Walker bidding goodbye to Dominic Torreto, even after he left to meet his maker. The producers of the film were proud to show the level of CGI they had employed to make the actor’s last film a good spectacle. Now, it turns out that a similar kind of technology based on artificial intelligence can be adopted widely in most of the fields, including porn.

A Reddit user, going by the name of ‘Deepfakes’, has been in the limelight for posting fake porn videos of pornstars. While fake videos are nothing new to the industry, the surprising element in Deepfakes’ version is that Artificial Intelligence plays an important role, as the protagonist of the videos. As Motherboard’s report describes, one of his recent videos shows ‘Wonder Woman’ Gal Gadot engaging in a romantic intercourse with his stepbrother. While it seems legit at first glance, keen eyes will observe that the body of the woman is very different to that of the actress’. Moreover, there’s some issue with the lip sync as well as irregular black lines on the face.

If you were excited to see Gal Gadot or her body duplicate perform porn acts before the camera, then you are wrong. Deepfake’s video uses artificial intelligence to carefully map the face of the character on to the pornstar’s face. He relied on Google image search, stock photos, and YouTube videos to compile Gadot’s face. He then trained his AI algorithms to study Gadot and the pornstar’s facial movements, process the data and eventually churn out a video with Gadot’s face cleverly crafted on top of the pornstar’s body.

In a conversation with Motherboard, Deepfakes said, “I just found a clever way to do face-swap. With hundreds of face images, I can easily generate millions of distorted images to train the network,” he said. “After that, if I feed the network someone else's face, the network will think it's just another distorted image and try to make it look like the training face.”

This is probably one of the major negative sides of AI that has surfaced in the recent times. We have been talking about AI taking over the world and destroying the human race with military weapons, but nobody has ever thought about AI falling into the wrong hands and emotionally hurting individuals. This kind of fake videos violates the right to consent for both the actress and the pornstar, making the work unethical.

But that’s how AI is out there on the Internet, waiting to be shaped according to anybody’s will. “Every technology can be used with bad motivations, and it's impossible to stop that,” said Deepfakes. “The main difference is how easy it is to do that by everyone. I don't think it's a bad thing for more average people to engage in machine learning research.” What he indirectly means that a few years from now, any Tom, Dick and Harry will be able to extract revenge on anyone by simply using a bunch of computer codes to put a face of their classmate or colleague on someone else’s and defame publicly.

This also shows that a person with malicious intentions will continue doing what they want to do in the name of science. Therefore, it depends on Internet regulatory bodies to counter this unethical practice by using the power of AI to detect similar kinds of video and possibly track the developer. Porn websites, that practice a legal form of this profession, should also jump into the scene and prevent misuse of new technology.

Deepfakes alone has posted fake videos of Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson, Maisie Williams and Aubrey Plaza, apart from Gal Gadot’s on his account. And this is just one user looking to make a name for himself; there might be several others who have been posting similar kinds of anonymously. Therefore, if you stumble upon some unseen explicit footage of a renowned actor/actress, do think for a minute before you indulge yourself in the world of pleasure — are you looking at actual human porn or AI-based trickery?

(source)