Social media is resisting the growing and disturbing trend of ai generated porn art computer video on the world wide web. These videos are edited to look like celebrity faces, often with frightening fluidity, and have been used as “deepfakes” by the name of the reddit user who helped birth the genre. Motherboard first started talking about deepfakes back in december, a piece of work that seems to have directly influenced the policy posted by twitter and reddit this week. Both sites have announced that they are going to ban all deepfakes.
From reddit via motherboard:
Reddit hopes to be a welcoming, open platform for the majority. Trusting its regulars to maintain an environment that cultivates sincere conversation. As of february 7, 2018, we have made two availability updates to the store’s human policy regarding inadvertent pornography and pornographic or obscene content with the help of minors. Previously, these policies were combined into a single rule; now these diseases will be divided into 2 isolated ones. Communities relating to this offer and users posting such content will be banned from our site.
And on twitter:
“We will ban any account that we identify. As an original intimate media poster, it was produced or distributed without the subject’s permission,” a twitter representative told me in a digital email. “We will also block any account intended for posting this direction of content.”
Banning is the best news. It’s encouraging to see platforms like reddit and twitter, which have historically not been great at banning problematic content early, oppose something so potentially dangerous. Of course, the more serious and looming question is that this technique is and is only better. It means that not only katy perry has to worry about it, that her head will be wrongly edited in a fuck, but also politicians, world leaders and others, everyone wants a computer video to put words in that mouth. Or worse.