AI-Assisted Fake Porn Is Here and We’re All Fucked
The video was created with a machine learning algorithm, using easily accessible materials and open-source code that anyone with a working knowledge of deep learning algorithms could put together.
It's especially striking considering that it's allegedly the work of one person—a Redditor who goes by the name 'deepfakes'—not a big special effects studio that can digitally recreate a young Princess Leia in Rogue One using CGI. Instead, deepfakes uses open-source machine learning tools like TensorFlow, which Google makes freely available to researchers, graduate students, and anyone with an interest in machine learning.
Like the Adobe tool that can make people say anything, and the Face2Face algorithm that can swap a recorded video with real-time face tracking, this new type of fake porn shows that we're on the verge of living in a world where it's trivially easy to fabricate believable videos of people doing and saying things they never did. Even having sex.
Artificial intelligence researcher Alex Champandard told me in an email that a decent, consumer-grade graphics card could process this effect in hours, but a CPU would work just as well, only more slowly, over days.
Ethically, the implications are “huge,” Champandard said. Malicious use of technology often can’t be avoided, but it can be countered.
“We need to have a very loud and public debate,” he said. ”Everyone needs to know just how easy it is to fake images and videos, to the point where we won't able to distinguish forgeries in a few months from now.
Champandard said researchers can then begin developing technology to detect fake videos and help moderate what’s fake and what isn’t, and internet policy can improve to regulate what happens when these types of forgeries and harassment come up.
“In a strange way,” this is a good thing, Champandard said. “We need to put our focus on transforming society to be able to deal with this.”