Noel Martin was just 18 when he found pornographic pictures of himself circulating online. She couldn’t remember taking it, let alone sharing an intimate image of her. But while it was her face in those images, her body wasn’t hers.
She became the victim of what was later known as a “deepfake”. Her pornographic photos were manipulated to look like her using images she shared on her personal social media accounts.
“This is a life sentence,” Martin told Euronews Next. “It can destroy people’s lives, livelihoods, employability, interpersonal and romantic relationships. And when someone is targeted, there is little that can be done.”
A deepfake is a digitally altered video or image created to portray someone in a fake scenario. Deepfake technology could theoretically be used for more lighthearted, satirical, or well-meaning purposes, but Deeptrace Labs in 2019 report We found that 96% of online deepfake content is non-consensual porn.
Just this week, a 22-year-old man in New York declared Six months in prison for posting deepfake pornographic pictures of former school classmates using teenage photos taken from social media accounts.
fight for justice
When the same thing happened to her in 2013, Martin tried to limit the damage by going to the police and asking them to remove the images. Given that there was no law against it, there was nothing they could do.
“Even if you try to take things down, there is still the problem of asking who should be held responsible if you are the victim of this. Because we’re taking it down. The fact that they’re hosted is just one factor to this,” Martin said.
“They can keep doing this if they don’t hold the perpetrators accountable, or hold the responsible ones accountable,” she added.
Martin has pursued a career in law and has spent years pushing for legislation against the sharing of non-consensual intimate images in Australia. It pioneered a new law criminalizing the distribution of non-intimate images and “revenge porn.”
Ten years after her own traumatic experience, Martin, now a 28-year-old lawyer and legal researcher at the University of Western Australia, is open to allegations of non-consensual sexual content, particularly content created using deepfake technology. claims to oppose the sharing of
“What we’re ultimately trying to do as a victim community is push for legislation, push countries around the world to criminalize this problem, and encourage victims to seek help. is to promote the development of infrastructure to enable
The Rise of Porn Deepfakes
Porn deepfakes have been spotted online for years, but recent major advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and increased accessibility to such technology have made them both disturbingly real and deceptive. You can now easily create sexual material.
When deepfakes first came out, the main purpose behind them was to create pornographic videos featuring the faces of celebrities.
The term deepfake itself surfaced in 2017 when users with the alias on the social platform Reddit famously created and shared manipulated pornographic videos of female celebrities such as Scarlett Johansson and Taylor Swift. It’s time to
Most recently, deepfakes in porn made headlines in January. Popular Twitch streamer Brandon Ewing (known online as “Atrioc”) was spotted opening a deepfake porn website in his browser during his live stream on the platform. The site featured manipulated images of his fellow Twitch streamers and friends.
Ewing has since issued a tearful apology and suspended his streaming activities for several weeks. Meanwhile, Twitch has updated its community guidelines to ban deepfake porn on its platform.
In his apology, Ewing said he became “pathologically curious” after seeing an ad for deepfake porn on a popular porn site and clicked to pay to access the video.
Female Twitch streamers have seen their names come into controversy, many of whom didn’t even know such content existed online.
In fact, the scandal on Twitch caused a spike in online searches for the phrases “deepfake porn,” “porn deepfake,” and “deepfake.” Data from Google Trends.
Sophie Compton, co-founder of the Coalition My Image My ChoiceIt campaigns against the exploitation of intimate images.
“It’s not just creators, it’s all users. These are normal boys. These are people from our school, maybe some women. But mostly men. And this is classmates, Friends, brothers and boyfriends, Compton told Euronews Next.
“They may not realize that their participation is also part of the problem, and it helps validate what is very, very harmful to women.”
How deepfakes are used against victims
Celebrity porn deepfakes have been around for years, but with recent advances in AI, virtually anyone today can fall victim to such content.
This technology can also be used to discredit and blackmail people in order to silence or undermine them.
“There are new deepfake porn websites popping up every month, and these are developing into commercialized businesses,” Compton said, adding that these websites were opened with no apparent penalty. added.
“People are kind of branded as deepfakers, they accept bitcoin, they accept PayPal, they have taglines and taglines and logos.”
Whether the motivation for creating and sharing pornographic deepfakes is to embarrass, defame, harass, or simply make money from the victim, the content may be genuine or fake. It often reflects some men’s fantasies of using explicit images to demean and objectify women, whether they are or not.
Martin told Euronews Next: “From the point of view of the target, even if something can be determined to be fake or completely unrealistic, the damage is irreparable. ‘ said.
“If a deepfake of you is created, people will associate you with whatever you’re portrayed in, even if you could tell it.”
Indian investigative journalist and Washington Post contributor Rana Ayub was the victim of a smear campaign in which her porn deepfakes were used to try to silence her.
she remembers her tragic experience digit She explained that being seen as outspoken and “anti-establishment” while being a Muslim woman made her a target of hate on social media.
But when a fake porn video of her went viral and she was so shocked that she couldn’t even see her family, the online abuse she was used to suddenly felt very real.
“The whole country was watching porn videos impersonating me, but I didn’t feel like doing anything,” she said.
“Ever since the day the video came out, I’ve never been the person I used to be. I used to be very dogmatic, but now I’m more cautious about what I post online.” I’ve done a fair amount of self-censorship under pressure,” she wrote.
“It’s a very dangerous tool and I don’t know where we’re going.”
Are there laws and regulations that protect us from porn deepfakes?
Campaigners say it’s now too easy to create a deepfake to openly humiliate a person, and this lack of regulation and accountability is letting victims down.
“The message being sent to the people creating these forms is that no one is coming for you. What you are doing is not illegal and there are no consequences,” Compton said. I got
The European Union has proposed new regulations to combat harmful online content, but these regulations have yet to prove that they can fully protect people from non-consenting porn deepfakes.
for example, artificial intelligence lawis currently being debated in the European Parliament, requiring creators to clearly disclose when content has been artificially generated or manipulated. But campaigners say that once deepfake content is exposed and forever linked to victims, disclaimers do little to deter deepfake creators or bring victims to justice. I’m here.
However, another EU law in the works is Directive on Gender-Based Violence, proposed in 2022. The bill criminalizes the sharing of intimate images without consent, and perpetrators could face prison terms.
The role of technology companies and online platforms
In the meantime, victims are counting on online platforms to update their policies to crack down on deepfake porn content.
OpenAI, the company behind image-generating tool DALL-E, has already removed explicit content from its data, filtering requests to block the creation of images of celebrities and politicians.
Another popular AI model, Midjourney, blocks certain keywords and prompts users to report problematic images to moderators.
TikTok also requires that deepfake or manipulated content be labeled as fake or tampered with, and prohibits deepfakes of private individuals and young people.
When updating its community guidelines, Twitch warned that any intentional promotion, creation, or sharing of deepfake porn will be banned immediately. Any glimpse of such content, even if it was intended to express anger, “results in being taken down and cracked down,” the company wrote in a blog post.
Meanwhile, Meta, OnlyFans, and Pornhub have all started participating in a new “Take It Down” tool that allows teens to report explicit images and videos from the Internet.
“Law enforcement, governments and regulators need to come together to address this because there is only so much they can do if domestic countries around the world are on their own. is a global problem that needs global solutions,” Martin said.
“I also think victims and survivors need to be at the table whenever a decision is made about this because they are excluded from decisions being made for us and without us. Because it’s very often done,” she added.
