mar24
Nearly 4,000 celebrities found to be victims of deepfake pornography
Channel 4 News finds 255 British people including its presenter Cathy Newman to have been doctored into explicit images
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/21/celebrities-victims-of-deepfake-pornography
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— CARA HUNTER, A NORTHERN IRISH POLITICIAN, WAS ONLY WEEKS away from the country’s 2022 legislative elections when she received a WhatsApp message from someone she didn’t know. The man quickly asked her if she was the woman in an explicit video — a 40-second clip that he shared with the then-24-year-old. Opening the video, Hunter was confronted with an AI-generated deepfake video of herself performing graphic sexual acts. Within days, the false clip had gone viral, and the Northern Irishwoman was bombarded with direct messages from men around the world with increasingly sexual and violent messages.
“It was a campaign to undermine me politically,” Hunter, who won her 2022 Northern Ireland Assembly seat by just a few votes, told me. “They had felt that, because they saw an explicit of someone who looked like me, it was OK to send me nasty messages. It has left a tarnished perception of me that I can’t control. I’ll have to pay for the repercussions of this for the rest of my life.”
Before we get into this, let’s be very clear: Deepfake pornography, unfortunately, is not new. It’s been around for almost a decade and almost entirely targets women. It regained public attention after Taylor Swift became the latest victim when AI-generated graphic images of her were created, mostly via a 4Chan message board, and then shared widely on X, formerly known as Twitter. I also don’t want to mansplain what every woman reading this already knows. This is all about power. Power to demean women; power to control how women can participate in public life; power to silence voices that men (and it’s almost entirely men) believe are not worthy. Don’t take my word for it. There’s been some great reporting on this, for years. (Here, here and here.) I could find no examples of male politicians targeted with such sexual abuse.
https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/digital-bridge/deepfake-porn-is-political-violence/
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