CYBERSPACE—Photoshopped fake celebrity porn images have been around almost as long as online porn itself. By one count, taken about four years ago, there were 182 images of the late Princess Diana with her face digitally pasted onto existing hardcore images—along with 124 Cate Blanchett porn images, a whopping 524 of Australian pop singer Kylie Minogue and 195 fake porn shots of tennis star Maria Sharapova, among many others.
But despite the possibly touchy legal status of fake celebrity porn, the genre has now advanced to a new and dazzling level, thanks to the rapid progression of digital technology. As the online tech news site Motherboard (part of the Vice media group) reported earlier this week, tech-savvy porn fans, often based in popular online forums like Reddit, have been using machine-learning algorithms—a form of artificial intelligence—to create full-on, hardcore porn videos “starring” their favorite female celebrities.
One recent example featured Israeli actress Gal Gadot, best known for the title role in this summer’s superhero blockbuster Wonder Woman, in no-holds-barred action with her “stepbrother.”
Of course, the female performer in the video is no more Gal Gadot than the male co-star in her stepbrother. A Reddit-dweller using the online alias “deepfakes”, created the Gadot porn using open-source AI software, which allowed deepfakes to switch out Gadot’s face with the actual performer’s, in an otherwise unaltered hardcore video.
The effect is not perfect, but the level of realism is more than likely enough for Gadot fans who crave nothing more than to witness their Wonder Woman enthusiastically indulging in explicit sex acts. To sample an SFW clip from the Gadot video, in which the performer with her face pulls a Fleshlight out of a box, click on this link.
According to the Motherboard report, deepfakes has also concocted porn videos starring the digitally inserted faces of other celebs, including Scarlett Johansson, Taylor Swift and Aubrey Plaza.
While in theory, the publicly accessible AI tools could be used to insert anyone’s face into a porn video—or any video—celebrities make the easiest targets for the simple reason that there are far more images of celebs, and therefore far more available facial expressions, than of regular just plain folks.
To create a convincing celebrity fake porn video, according to the tech blog Gizmodo, the AI tools must pull of the internet a “plentiful supply of images to stitch something basic together, which might not be as feasible for non-public figures.”
The AI algorithm uses publicly (if not legally) available images of a celebrity to “learn” what her face looks like—giving it the capability to reshape any other face to convincingly resemble the specific celebrity. That way, if a viewer isn’t examining the video too closely, the illusion of a celebrity doing porn appears complete.
The Reddit user known as deepfakes has apparently created his own, original AI algorithm by combining attributes from open source machine learning software such as TensorFlow and Keras. According to experts, deepfakes wouldn’t need to be a software genius to combine the two programs.
"I just found a clever way to do face-swap," deepflakes said, as quoted by Motherboard. "With hundreds of face images, I can easily generate millions of distorted images to train the network. After that if I feed the network someone else's face, the network will think it's just another distorted image and try to make it look like the training face."
The most difficult aspect of creating the celebrity porn videos appears to be the wait times. A typical graphics card could take hours to generate a single, short video, and a consumer-level CPU chip, of the kind found in any personal computer, would take several days.
While no celebrities have so far said anything in public about their forged porn performances, professional porn performers who spoke to Motherboard are not happy with the new AI phenomenon.
“One important thing that always needs to happen is consent,” veteran performer Grace Evangeline said. “Consent in private life as well as consent on film. Creating fake sex scenes of celebrities takes away their consent. It’s wrong.”
“It’s really disturbing,” retired performer Alia Janine added. “It kind of shows how some men basically only see women as objects that they can manipulate and be forced to do anything they want. ... It just shows a complete lack of respect for the porn performers in the movie, and also the female actresses.”
Above, screenshot from SendVids, which hosts the Gal Gadot video.
