Having a sexual fantasy about a celebrity is nothing out of the ordinary - every Star Wars fan who grew up dreaming about Princess Leia in the golden bikini will tell you that. Whether it originates from a Hollywood hottie's racy scene in the new blockbuster or a pop star's suggestive dance moves in their latest music video, it's certainly not uncommon to get carried away from time to time, and we all have that one celeb who we'd die to get into bed with.
In fact, when We-Vibe asked 1,032 men and women across the nation about their self-pleasuring habits, it was revealed in their 2016 Global Passion Report that famous faces came into the bedroom all the time, with 27 per cent of the surveyed participants reporting that they thought about specific celebrities while they masturbated.
However, when you bring technology into the mix, fantasies get a whole lot messier. Recently, it came to light that a new face-swap app was being used to put celebrities' faces onto the bodies of porn stars. The idea, it seems, is that every celebrity you could think of would effectively have a sex tape.
The fake celebrity sex video craze first came about back in December 2017, when Motherboard revealed that a Reddit user named "deepfakes" was face-swapping celebrity faces onto the bodies of porn performers. As the Reddit post began to gain more and more attention, the user soon created his own Reddit sub-forum - also called "deepfakes" - where he, and other users of the site, posted their phoney celebrity sex videos. Afterwards, the affair expanded, with another user called "deepfakeapp" creating a downloadable app, named FakeApp, that reportedly uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to produce face-swapped pornos with minimal effort.
Only weeks after the whole situation arose, a quick search revealed a bevy of disturbing videos up for grabs, starring celebrities like
Jennifer Lawrence, Gal Gadot, Maisie Williams,
Katy Perry and
Blake Lively. The concerning fake footage was even divided into sub-sections which included size - "
Taylor Swift: Chunky Edition" and films, like the Star Wars themed "Daisy Ridley - In a galaxy, far, far away..."
This situation is exactly one of those that celebrities have come to fear. While it's true that in the past, many famous faces have been dragged into sex video scandals, the idea of a stranger putting your face on another person's body and making your image do whatever they want it to do is a whole other kettle of fish. After all, it's not exactly pleasant to have thousands of horny strangers watching your randy exploits - even if they are completely and utterly fake.
A few months later it was announced that Reddit had finally banned the nearly 100,000 strong community, with their new rule about “involuntary pornography” now explicitly banning “depictions that have been faked”, as well as posting non-explicit images and video for the purposes “of faking explicit content or soliciting ‘lookalike’ pornography”. In addition, Twitter and Pornhub banned pornography made using AI-generated face-swap technology, naming it non-consensual porn. However, even with the page dead and buried, there is one thing that still makes the situation worrying. You see, although you'd automatically assume that the whole thing was illegal in the first place, you would be wrong.
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When the clips came to public attention, it was debated in the media whether or not they could be considered illegal in a court of law, and many reports came back with a big fat "no". Allegedly, until Reddit banned the clips, there was little that public figures could do about people who use their images for porn. If you live in the United States and someone does this with your face, the law is reportedly simply not yet advanced enough to help you out.
Although some legal experts have stated that they believe extortion, harassment and defamation laws could be utilised to target those making and using AI-generated porn, others believe that America needs more specific legislation. According to lawyers, much of the current legislation surrounding this issue carries the premise that non-consensual porn is a
privacy violation. This creates problems for victims of FakeApp porn, given the fact that although it's certainly personally humiliating for them, it's not
technically a privacy issue. Ultimately, it seems you can’t sue someone for exposing the intimate details of your life if it’s not actually
your life that they’re exposing.
On the other hand, experts living across the pond seemed more positive about the situation. Professor of Law at the London School of Economics, Andrew Murray, explained to the British newspaper The Sun why creating videos like these would most likely be breaking the law in Britain, saying: "To put the face of an identifiable person onto images of others and then share them publicly is a breach of Data Protection Law. Should the images be received as genuine images and the celebrity, as a result, is viewed less favourably by members of society then they could sue for defamation if it was shown to have harmed their reputation."
To illustrate his point, Murray gave the example of "a celebrity with a 'clean' image, such as
Emma Watson", who was actually one of the Tinseltown residents targeted by users of the explicit video forum. He added: "More likely such images could be viewed as forms of harassment, which they could report to the police." In addition, Simon Miles, a partner at intellectual property specialists Edwin Coe in London, told The Sun that creating these sex tapes could "amount to unlawful processing of the celebrity's personal data", and that there could also be issues around copyright infringement.
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Although lawyers in Britain put a more positive spin on the legal repercussions, it's a sad fact that neither country appears to be fully equipped to deal with a scenario like this, with no specific law in place to stop people from creating further content. With a rise in the accessibility of intrusive technology and incidents like these becoming more commonplace, lawmakers need to be more prepared.
It certainly wouldn't be surprising, given how easy the videos were to make. According to one Redditor, the process of creating such a video took users only "around fiveish hours - decent for what it is" - and all that was required to create the footage is a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) and CUDA support, a relatively easily accessible parallel computing platform. A "dummy's guide" to the process even became available online, allowing anyone with a computer to develop their very own celebrity porn show.
At the time, the user who created it even spoke of advancing his creation further. Speaking to Motherboard over email, he said: "I think the current version of the app is a good start, but I hope to streamline it even more in the coming days and weeks. Eventually, I want to improve it to the point where prospective users can simply select a video on their computer, download a neural network correlated to a certain face from a publicly available library, and swap the video with a different face with the press of one button."
His lax attitude towards the app, as well as his determination to continue progressing his design, highlights the danger of technology like this. While use of FakeApp is not necessarily deemed illegal, it seems fair to assume that most people would agree the practice is intrusive. Therefore, it would be deeply misguided to turn a blind eye to it and we can only hope that this instance spurs lawmakers to accordingly adjust the law to protect the innocent. At the end of the day, you can have that Princess Leia fantasy, but once you use an innocent person's face to make it come to life, you're crossing a line.
