People have been creating fake images of other people forever. In bygone eras, photo negatives were clipped and spliced onto other negatives to put people in the same frame. As photoshop got better, digital artists would cut the head off the body of a person in an image and paste it on another body. The better artists would even take skin tone, texture, and lighting into account to create their fakes.

2018 proved to be a pivotal year in which AI technology reached a point where new images could be created by training machine learning models to tack on people’s faces on bodies in photo realistic ways. Deepfakes were born on the premise of slapping a celebrity’s body onto images of other celebrities.

Of course, it’s almost always women.

And of course, perverts generated nudes of A-list celebrities by using an AI to mesh the celebrity’s face onto a pornstar’s body or in some cases machine generated naked bodies. Today, there are companies specializing in generating deepfake porn using celebrities and regular people.

Unfortunately, for many women, you don’t have to be an A-list celebrity to be a target of deepfake abuse. For some money, a perv can take snapshots of one of their friends, or colleagues, and use an AI to generate pornos where their friends and colleagues are the star.

THIS IS A FORM OF SEXUAL ABUSE.

Earlier this week, Twitch streamer, Brandon Ewing; aka Atrioc, issued a public apology for watching non-consensual, deepfake pornographic vids of some of his fellow Twitch streamers. He claims he wasn’t watching women he knew. Twitch streamers, like QTCinderella and Sweet Anita, had to find out that they were violated by happen stance.

Imagine how many women are being violated and don’t know it.

These people are sick, and should be punished. There are real conversations around the use of deepfakes for the exploitation of women. Some people are resistant to calling it sexual assault or rape, but it’s hard to argue other wise.

When your likeness is used without your permission to generate sexually explicit, pornographic material, then what is it? Only three states elevate non-consensual, sexual deepfake generation to the level of prosecution.

Ewing got busted because his deepfake pornstash was caught on camera while streaming. It took him getting caught to openly admit how shitty his actions were. Meanwhile, the deepfake porn creator took down his site because of Atrium’s apology. To quote, “I feel like the total piece of shit I am.” These men have no scruples. Why even watch in the first place? It’s like porn isn’t enough. You need to have knowledge of exploiting people while consuming it.

The Internet is a tough place for women.

To all of the men out there who aren’t beating their chests and crying, “but it ain’t me,” sit your ass down and shut the Hell up. To all of the men out there who are decent, but aren’t saying anything when shitty things happen to women, check your boys. Check your mans. Check your friends and tell them to stop being a dick to women.

Read the article on Motherboard for the whole story.

Don’t get me started on his wife.

-MJ