The creation of sexually explicit deepfake content is likely to become a criminal offense in England and Wales as concern grows over the use of artificial intelligence to exploit and harass women.
If they're going to go this way, I don't think it should be limited to just porn. There are plenty of ways you could ruin someone's life without a deepfake being sexually explicit.
There already are a lot of laws covering that. This one is to cover an additional angle where people create deepfake without provably publishing it, the intent being that showing it to friends and verbally threatening to "leak" them should be easier to prosecute.
If you create a deepfake and share it, you're slapped with two crimes.
Yeah the way people can recreate someone “in need of assistance” to trick family or associates is really scary especially for people who aren’t exactly tech savvy. That seems to me to be a worse crime than an explicit video that is pretty obviously doctored
I wonder what happens when it just accidentally looks like someone but was intended to be a fictional person. Also, how much can you base it on a real person before it's considered a deep fake of that person? Would race-swapping be enough to make it a "new" person so it's not illegal anymore? My intuition is that just eye colour or something wouldn't be enough, but it's a sliding scale where the line must be drawn somewhere even if it's a fuzzy line.
What about an AI generated mashup of two people like those "what the child would look like" pictures back in the day. Does that violate both people or neither?
What about depicting a person older than they are now? That's technically not somebody that exists, but might in the future.
What if you use AI but make it look like it's hand-drawn or a cartoon?
What if you use AI to create sexual voice clips of a real person but use images that don't look like them or no image at all?
There are just so many possibilities and questions that I feel it might be impossible to legislate in a way that isn't always 10 steps behind or has a million unforeseen consequences.
There's already laws against using someone's likeness for commercial purposes without their consent, I'm guessing this will require the same fuzzy cutoff and basically just be up to the jury to decide or the judge to dismiss.
I have a hard time accepting this as a crime. What if the illustration hand-drawn, or clothed but still sexual in character? Is caricature illegal, by this standard?
You can jerk off to photos of people, you can imagine some wild things involving other people etc.
If you just create some deepfake porn to masturbate by yourself to, I don't see a big problem with that.
The only issue I can find is, that due to neglect someone else sees it, or even hears about it.
The problem starts with sharing. Like it would be sexual harassment to tell people who you are masturbating to, especially sharing with the "actors" of your fantasies.
There is however another way this could go:
Everyone can now share nudes with way less risk.
If anyone leaks them, just go: "That's a deepfake. This is obviously a targeted attack by the heathens of the internet, who are jealous of my pure and upstanding nature. For me only married missionary with lights out."
This is why we should be making laws around likeness rights. If you damage somebody by publicly using their name to spread falsehoods, that's defamation or libel. But, if you produce an image or video of their likeness instead of using their name, there's no legal recourse. Makes no sense this day in age
Who decides how similar somebody is "allowed" to look to another? There are people who bear an uncanny resemblance to others. And what of identical twins? Can one sue the other if they do porn?
I can imagine a non-zero amount of people would consent to a deep-fake porn video of themselves having sex with some generic hot woman, just as one example.
Could be very lucrative if you are already in porn and want to make some money from your likeness. This guy's gonna pay me $500 to make a video and I don't even have to do anything?
Could also be very good for porn stars who have "aged out" but can still make videos using their younger bodies as weird as that may be.
Yeah the way people can recreate someone “in need of assistance” to trick family or associates is really scary especially for people who aren’t exactly tech savvy. That seems to me to be a worse crime than an explicit video that is pretty obviously doctored
“Deepfake pornography is a growing cause of gender-based harassment online and is increasingly used to target, silence and intimidate women — both on and offline,” Meta Oversight Board Co-Chair Helle Thorning-Schmidt said in a statement.
considers
I think that there's an argument for taking the opposite position. If someone could make deepfake porn trivially and it were just all over the place, nobody would care about it; one knows that it's fake.
In fact, it'd kind of make leaked actual pornography no-impact as a side effect, unless there were a way to distinguish distinguish between deepfakes. And that's a harder issue to resolve. I was reading a discussion yesterday about sextortion on here and talking about how technically-difficult it would be to keep someone from recording sex video chats, that there'd always be an analog hole at least. But...there is another route to solve that, which is simply to make such a video valueless because there's a flood of generated video.
Deep fake recognition is already available. And, while what you predict sounds logical, these criminals prey on emotions. I feel that a lot of innocent people will be victimized even if deep fake porn becomes common.