96 Percent Of All Deepfakes On The Web Are Porn, Report Said

08/10/2019

When the first deepfake was posted on Reddit, which featured the face of a Hollywood actress over a real porn star's body, the world was not ready.

The technology quickly took the stage.

In 2019, the term 'deepfake' has become a generic noun for manipulated videos with AI. Many of the artificially-made footage videos have been uploaded to almost every single video-streaming platform, posing concerns to lawmakers.

While many of the deepfakes were made to impersonate popular political figures by making them say what there weren't suppose to say, occasionally for fun, most of the deepfakes on the internet are actually porn related.

According to a report from Deeptrace:

"We identified is the prominence of non-consensual deepfake pornography, which accounted for 96% of the total deepfake videos online."
Deepfake
Credit: Facebook

Deeptrace also said that the top four websites dedicated to deepfake pornography have received a staggering 134 million views on videos targeting hundreds of female celebrities worldwide.

In Deeptrace's finding, all the people edited into the pornographic clips were women. Clips of the most popular figures, like from Western actresses and South Korean pop celebrities, can get millions of views, each.

Nonprofits have reported that women journalists and political activists are already being attacked or harassed with deepfakes. Henry Ajder, a researcher at Deeptrace who worked on the firm's report, said there are deepfake forums where users discuss or request pornographic deepfakes of women they personally know, such as ex-girlfriends, wanting to see them edited into a pornographic clip.

And what make things worse is that, many actors have succeeded in leveraging deepfakes as the synthetic media to influence people into believing what's not.

This also worries the cybersecurity landscape, as they are forced to enhance their traditional cyber threats to also enable protection against entirely new attack vectors.

Deepfakes' impact can be felt on a global scale.

While to some of the footage are created simply for laughs and joy, but to the general public, deepfakes can be misleading, and also the source of misinformation.

To create its report, Deeptrace took a kind of deepfake census during June and July 2019, by doing a mix of manual searching and web scraping from major porn sites to mainstream video services. In the report, the company found almost 15,000 videos openly presented as deepfakes.

This is nearly twice as many as seven months earlier.

The worrying trend is because deepfakes are here to stay. And Deeptrace's report may not show the real number, as many deepfakes don't openly say that they are deepfakes.

With the tools needed to create deepfakes are becoming more sophisticated and more widely available, more and more people could and would create deepfakes, and populate the web with fakery.

"This significant viewership demonstrates a market for websites creating and hosting deepfake pornography, a trend that will continue to grow unless decisive action is taken," the report said, suggesting that the trend won't end anytime soon