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Reddit bans 'deepfakes' AI porn communities

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Re: Reddit bans 'deepfakes' AI porn communities

#21

Fake porn of celebrities has been prevalent on the Internet for a long time. I don't have precise statistics, but I think it might predate the web. For the most part it hasn't been particularly controversial. Now that advances in technology have significantly improved the quality, everybody suddenly has a problem with it. Let's back this up a few steps. You're an actor, you appear on television. By being filmed and a…

Do you honestly think that using someone else's copywritten material to transform yet another person's likeness into something that very few people would consent to (when you almost certainly didn't try to get consent) is a fair use right, legally or socially?

Re: Reddit bans 'deepfakes' AI porn communities

#22
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely true, and not that you’re arguing for this but: Just because the technology is out there doesnt mean we throw our hands in the air and give up. Yes it’s there, it’s going to be used for most of the nefarious cases we can imagine, but that doesn’t mean we have to tolerate someone using our image against our will. In fact, I would imagine that the data privacy advocates I often see on hn should see this as a…

i am on the fence. using my face, and making money off it without my permission seems wrong. however, what if the 'animated' porn star just happens to look like me? inevitably, a generated porn star will look like SOMEONE. for me, this is getting murky. then there is the case that the program generates porn for me. if i privately generate porn using a famous person's image, to me - thats my right. no different than m…

Just to clarify the conundrum in your second paragraph: this is definitively privileging your privacy over someone else’s. What you do in private is your business, yes, but that doesn’t give you the right to be a voyeur simply because you are doing so in seclusion.

That’s why I think this is a poor argument.

Re: Reddit bans 'deepfakes' AI porn communities

#23
post #2

There's no way of putting this tech back in the box. And it's only going to get more powerful. What if someone combines it with some kind of "deep ageing", to create artificial child porn? Sexual representations of children, even if completely artificial and involving no victims, are illegal in many jurisdictions, but not all. We're only scratching the surface of what semantic editing of video is going to be capable…

Absolutely true, and not that you’re arguing for this but: Just because the technology is out there doesnt mean we throw our hands in the air and give up. Yes it’s there, it’s going to be used for most of the nefarious cases we can imagine, but that doesn’t mean we have to tolerate someone using our image against our will. In fact, I would imagine that the data privacy advocates I often see on hn should see this as a…

>No, Lyft employees should not be able to view our trip history willynilly. No, the NSA should not be able to gobble up all of our google searches for profiling us. And no, we should not have to suffer being put in porn against our will because we are a person in the public eye.

These are centralized entities. In theory it is very easy to implement sound internal controls surrounding the access of that type of data given audit logs or whatever. The issue with deepfakes is that given a reasonable stack of images, anyone can produce their own porn. If you're a woman with many many photos on a public instagram account you can be a likely target given that anyone can go ahead and scrap your images. However, if you're one of the millions of wives that doesn't have a large presence on social media, then the deepfake can easily be tracked back to the spouse who has access to that private stack of photos.

The normal caveats apply: you need access to a gpu, probably access to Tor to download the source in case github shuts the repos, etc etc. But when there is a will there is a way.

Re: Reddit bans 'deepfakes' AI porn communities

#24

I'm on the fence on this one. If I draw a stick figure and put your name above it, is that unethical? What if I add a speech bubble saying something risqué? What if I'm a talented artist and I draw something pretty life-like? I don't see the lines here being too clear without claiming down on all expression.

None of these examples are really anywhere close to deepfake porn videos.

- Porn is done under consent, where participants should be reasonably aware that it will be published

- Porn tarnishes reputations

If you pasted Daisy Ridley's face in a crowd in, say, China, doing every day stuff, no one would rightly care because there's no real potential unless you are doing it for some ulterior motive.

Re: Reddit bans 'deepfakes' AI porn communities

#25

Fake porn of celebrities has been prevalent on the Internet for a long time. I don't have precise statistics, but I think it might predate the web. For the most part it hasn't been particularly controversial. Now that advances in technology have significantly improved the quality, everybody suddenly has a problem with it. Let's back this up a few steps. You're an actor, you appear on television. By being filmed and a…

Usually people use the slippery slope to avoid things, not encourage a descent into depravity, but to each their own.

In any case, you shouldn't pretend as if this is morally okay just because you can focus in on each individual step and find a way to justify it. There are a lot of crimes that clearly fall into this bucket: stalking, for example. Any one interaction may be innocent, but it's the sum total of actions that completes the picture of abuse.

If you endorse distributing fake naked pictures of celebrities, you are a bad person, no matter your line of reasoning.

Re: Reddit bans 'deepfakes' AI porn communities

#26

Fake porn of celebrities has been prevalent on the Internet for a long time. I don't have precise statistics, but I think it might predate the web. For the most part it hasn't been particularly controversial. Now that advances in technology have significantly improved the quality, everybody suddenly has a problem with it. Let's back this up a few steps. You're an actor, you appear on television. By being filmed and a…

I'm sure if you would ask the people in those fakes they had a problem with it from the beginning. "It has always been a thing" isn't an argument for something.

Re: Reddit bans 'deepfakes' AI porn communities

#27

Fake porn of celebrities has been prevalent on the Internet for a long time. I don't have precise statistics, but I think it might predate the web. For the most part it hasn't been particularly controversial. Now that advances in technology have significantly improved the quality, everybody suddenly has a problem with it. Let's back this up a few steps. You're an actor, you appear on television. By being filmed and a…

Do you honestly think that using someone else's copywritten material to transform yet another person's likeness into something that very few people would consent to (when you almost certainly didn't try to get consent) is a fair use right, legally or socially?

Well, it is definitely transformative. In fact, nothing of the original work really survives the transformation.

You can't merely copyright your likeness.

As for socially, consider this: They have used the likeness of Bruce Lee, Carrie Fischer, Prince, and Peter Cushing in commercial works, undoubtedly without prior consent. We also have "public" nude photos taken and distributed of celebrities on a regular basis (paparazzi). This appears to be quite socially acceptable, so I'll run with the idea that "socially acceptable" is pretty fluid when it comes to celebrities likenesses.

Re: Reddit bans 'deepfakes' AI porn communities

#28
So, subreddits that do "safe for work" deepfakes are still around and allowed. This tells me that the technology will just get better and better and the use for it to create NSFW deepfakes will likewise get better and better (while existing underground?) until it really is impossible even for an expert to tell that they are fakes. That is what I assume will happen anyway.

Re: Reddit bans 'deepfakes' AI porn communities

#29

Fake porn of celebrities has been prevalent on the Internet for a long time. I don't have precise statistics, but I think it might predate the web. For the most part it hasn't been particularly controversial. Now that advances in technology have significantly improved the quality, everybody suddenly has a problem with it. Let's back this up a few steps. You're an actor, you appear on television. By being filmed and a…

> people are still 100% within their rights to combine images legally obtained in this way. And post them online. Are they? If you distribute movies and media to the public, you normally are breaking laws. (Hence the infamous FBI warning on movies for a couple decades now.) Likewise, you cannot just use people's likeness in marketing and other public uses without their permission. So I'm not at all sure that just bec…

> Likewise, you cannot just use people's likeness in marketing and other public uses without their permission.

Tell that to Prince and Peter Cushing. ;)

Re: Reddit bans 'deepfakes' AI porn communities

#30

I'm on the fence on this one. If I draw a stick figure and put your name above it, is that unethical? What if I add a speech bubble saying something risqué? What if I'm a talented artist and I draw something pretty life-like? I don't see the lines here being too clear without claiming down on all expression.

None of these examples are really anywhere close to deepfake porn videos. - Porn is done under consent, where participants should be reasonably aware that it will be published - Porn tarnishes reputations If you pasted Daisy Ridley's face in a crowd in, say, China, doing every day stuff, no one would rightly care because there's no real potential unless you are doing it for some ulterior motive.

I think how convincing a piece of media may be is at the crux of this issue. Photoshopped heads of celebrities on porn actors' bodies have been around for some time now and isn't, to my knowledge, illegal. The key difference here is that people hold video to be more trustworthy. Given the advancements in CG and now more recently with deep fakes, perhaps that's what needs to change; People should stop trusting video footage.
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