New AI deepfake app creates nude images of women in seconds - The Verge
▻https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/27/18760896/deepfake-nude-ai-app-women-deepnude-non-consensual-pornography
C’est l’été, la saison des scandales et du sexe.
The creator of the DeepNude app, who identified himself as “Alberto,” told Motherboard that he was inspired by memories of old comic book adverts for “X-ray specs,” which promised they could be used to see through peoples’ clothes. “Like everyone, I was fascinated by the idea that they could really exist and this memory remained,” said Alberto.
He says that he is a “technology enthusiast” rather than a voyeur, and is motivated by curiosity and enthusiasm for AI, as well as a desire to see if he could make an “economic return” from his experiments.
Quelle société qui considère comme scandaleuse une app pour adolecents coincés ! J’admets que ma vue du sujet est celle d’un indigène du pays de la Freikörperkultur (FKK) qu’on appelle naturisme en France. La culture du corps libre permet de regarder d’un oeuil indulgent des bêtises pareilles. On ne voit simplement pas l’intérêt d’une app qui affiches de fausses images de femmes nues quand tout le monde se met naturellement à poil dans les parcs publics pour prendre son bain de soleil.
A new AI-powered software tool makes it easy for anyone to generate realistic nude images of women simply by feeding the program a picture of the intended target wearing clothes.
The app is called DeepNude and it’s the latest example of AI-generated deepfakes being used to create compromising images of unsuspecting women. The software was first spotted by Motherboard’s Samantha Cole, and is available to download free for Windows, with a premium version that offers better resolution output images available for $99.
Both the free and premium versions of the app add watermarks to the AI-generated nudes that clearly identify them as “fake.” But in the images created by Motherboard, this watermark is easy to remove. (We were unable to test the app ourselves as the servers have apparently been overloaded.)
As we’ve seen with previous examples of deepfake pornography, the quality of the output is varied. It’s certainly not photorealistic, and when examined closely the images are easy to spot as fake. The AI flesh is blurry and pixelated, and the process works best on high-resolution images when the target is already wearing revealing clothes like a swimsuit.
But at lower resolutions — or when seen only briefly — the fake images are easy to mistake for the real thing, and could cause untold damage to individuals’ lives.
Although much of the discussion around the potential harms of deepfakes has centered on political misinformation and propaganda, the use of this technology to target women has been a constant since its creation. Indeed, that was how the tech first spread, with users on Reddit adapting AI research published by academics to create fake celebrity pornography.
A recent report from HuffPost highlighted how being targeted by deepfake pornography and nudes can upend someone’s life. As with revenge porn, these images can be used to shame, harass, intimidate, and silence women. There are forums where men can pay experts to create deepfakes of co-workers, friends, or family members, but tools like DeepNude make it easy to create such images in private, and at the touch of a button.
Notably, the app is not capable of producing nude images of men. As reported by Motherboard, if you feed it a picture of a man it simply adds a vulva.