Search interest has increased 31% in the past year and shows no signs of slowing. There are over 57 million hits for ‘deepfake porn’ on Google alone. Fast forward four years and that prophecy has come true and then some. Research conducted in 2018 by fraud detection company Sensity AI found that over 90% of all deepfakes online are non-consensual pornographic clips targeting women – and predicted that the number would double every six months. GANs have been praised for making incredible developments in film, healthcare and technology (driverless cars rely on it) – but sadly, in reality it’s more likely to be used for bad than good. Think of it as a teenager forging a fake ID and trying to get it by a bouncer if rejected, the harder the teen works on the forgery. Explained crudely, the tech behind deepfakes, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), is a two-part model: there’s a generator (which creates the content after studying similar images, audio, or videos) and the discriminator (which checks if the new content passes as legit). Only 39% of Cosmopolitan readers said they knew the word ‘deepfake’ during our research (it’s derived from a combination of ‘deep learning’ – the type of AI programming used – and ‘fake’). Yet, despite their prevalence, the term ‘deepfake’ (and its murky underworld) is still relatively unknown. That ‘gender swap’ app we all downloaded for a week during lockdown? You’ve guessed it: a low-fi form of deepfaking. Those eerily realistic videos of ‘Tom Cruise’ that went viral last February? Deepfakes. Remember the alternative ‘Queen’s Christmas message’ broadcast on Channel 4, that saw ‘Her Majesty’ perform a stunning TikTok dance? A deepfake. Basically, AI technology (which is getting more accessible by the day) can take any image and morph it into something else. This image is a deepfake – and part of a rapidly growing market.
And all it took to create was an easily discovered automated bot, a standard holiday snap and £5. Because this image, despite looking realistic, is a fake. Or upload it onto a porn site, leaving me spending the rest of my life fearful that every new person I meet has seen me naked. And hauntingly, it would take just two clicks of a button for someone to attach it to an email, post it on Twitter or mass distribute it to all of my contacts.
And that’s all.Īlthough the image isn’t exactly what I see staring back at me in the mirror in real life, it’s not a million miles away either. There’s the slight pixilation around part of my waist, but that could be easily fixed with amateur Photoshopping. I zoom in on the image, attempting to gauge what, if anything, could reveal the truth behind it. My denim bikini has been replaced with exposed, pale pink nipples – and a smooth, hairless crotch. I’m looking at a picture of my naked body, leaning against a hotel balcony in Thailand.
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