Feb 20, 2018
In December, Motherboard discovered a redditor named ‘deepfakes’ quietly enjoying his hobby: Face-swapping celebrity faces onto porn performers’ bodies. He made several convincing porn videos of celebrities—including Gal Gadot, Maisie Williams, and Taylor Swift—using a machine learning algorithm, his home computer, publicly available videos, and some spare time.
Since we first wrote about deepfakes, the practice of producing AI-assisted fake porn has exploded. More people are creating fake celebrity porn using machine learning, and the results have become increasingly convincing. Another redditor even created an app specifically designed to allow users without a computer science background to create AI-assisted fake porn. All the tools one needs to make these videos are free, readily available, and accompanied with instructions that walk novices through the process.
These are developments we and the experts we spoke to warned about in our original article. They have arrived with terrifying speed.
Shortly after Motherboard published its story, deepfakes created a subreddit named after himself dedicated to his practice two months ago. In that short time, it has already amassed more than 15,000 subscribers. Within the community, the word “deepfake” itself is now a noun for the kinds of neural-network generated fake videos their namesake pioneered.
