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Showing posts from January 25, 2021

Sex is Dead: Deepfake Porn and the Rape of Identity

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So you take some photos - just ordinary things, like a trip to the park with the kids, a night out with friends, a snapshot at the beach which happened to come out as a perfect windswept portrait. You share them on facebook so your family can see. They gradually filter down into the archive of your account where you forget about them completely. Several years pass. A phone call from a friend. “Do you realise that...?” “What?! You can’t be serious?” You check out the webpage. Sure enough. That’s your face. But it’s not your body. And you have never even seen the other people on the film - never mind engaged in a sexual orgy. It’s called deepfake porn. Someone took those old pictures of you and used a computer algorithm to generate a 3D model of your face to cut and paste into a sexually explicit film. Discovering that you have been the unconscious subject of a deepfake porn film would no doubt come as a shock. Just reading about it may well provoke a sense of disgust. Perhaps more