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People Are Using AI To Make Fake Sex Tapes With Celebrities

God help us

by Sarah Beauchamp

It looks like people are just searching for ways to make 2017 more perverted. Now, someone has made a fake sex tape with Gal Gadot and her "stepbrother." Yes, someone used artificial intelligence to make a recording simulating a celebrity having incestual sex. Can we cancel this year yet?

The video was created using a machine-learning algorithm that uses open-source code, meaning anyone with a working knowledge of deep-learning algorithms could do something like this, according to Motherboard.

While the video looks pretty ridiculous—you can clearly tell the woman featured is not actually Gadot—it's still eerily believable. The recording was created by just one guy, Reddit user "deepfakes," using TensorFlow, an "open-source software library for machine intelligence," free to researchers and grad students via Google. With the Face2Face algorithm, programmers are able to swap recorded video with real-time face tracking, making it possible for anyone to impersonate another human being, including public figures, doing or saying something they didn't—like having sex. 

Other actresses that have been subjected to this weird violation are Scarlett Johansson, Taylor Swift, and Aubrey Plaza. And porn industry professionals are speaking out about the controversy behind an algorithm like this: “One important thing that always needs to happen is consent,” porn performer Grace Evangeline told Vice's Motherboard. “Consent in private life as well as consent on film. Creating fake sex scenes of celebrities takes away their consent. It’s wrong.”

Artificial intelligence researcher Alex Champandard says it's important to have a "very loud and public debate" about this creepy new method of face swapping. "Everyone needs to know just how easy it is to fake images and videos, to the point where we won't be able to distinguish forgeries in a few months from now," he said. He added that there may even be a bright side to this technology for humankind: "We need to put our focus on transforming society to be able to deal with this.” I guess now we do.