Update: Reddit has joined Pornhub and Twitter in banning AI-generated ‘deepfake’ videos. The subreddit dedicated to the clips has been closed by moderators, citing violations of Reddit’s content policy (“specifically our policy against involuntary pornography”).
AI-generated porn videos, which replace performers faces with those of celebrities, will have no home on Pornhub. The adult-video giant has announced that “deepfakes” will be banned on its platform, making it clear that the site considers such films to be nonconsensual.
In a statement to Motherboard, Pornhub said it classed deepfakes in the same category as revenge 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. Nonconsensual content directly violates our TOS [terms of service] and consists of content such as revenge porn, deepfakes or anything published without a person’s consent or permission.”
The stance is reflected by Twitter, which has said it will suspend the accounts of those that originally post deepfakes content. GIF platform Gfycat and chat site Discord have also come out against the AI-generated clips, and Reddit’s r/deepfakes subreddit has also been closed.
What are deepfakes?
In a nutshell, deepfakes are videos that make use of machine learning to stitch one person’s face onto another person’s body.
The field of image recognition and digital manipulation has come in leaps and bounds over the past few years, and has now teetered into a point where previously complex tools have become easily accessible to the public. Google’s Culture app, for example, made headlines recently by letting users match their face to a work of art. Last year, the artist Mario Klingemann ran a comparable experiment with machine learning, imposing the voice and facial movements of Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway onto French singer Françoise Hardy.
Deepfakes are the side products of innovations like these. Sometimes they can be harmless and silly, such as the recent popularity of imposing Nicholas Cage’s face on various films. The pornographic deepfakes, on the other hand, are a deeply unsettling example of how this technology can be used to co-opt a person’s image, putting them into positions that they have in no way consented to.
Pornhub’s public condemnation of deepfakes will go some way to underline the ethical deplorability of putting an actress’s face on a porn star’s body – without either of those people’s wishes – but is it enough? The toothpaste is out of the tube; the availability of deepfake-creating tools makes it hard to stop the videos from being made altogether. Platforms can and should crack down on deepfakes, but the videos are arguably only the start of a much wider discussion around the truth of images in a world where faces can be convincingly swapped.
What does it mean to broadcast a person’s face in a world where images can be so easily manipulated, where someone’s words can come out of another’s mouth, or where a person’s identity can be brought into a sexual act against their will?
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