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And ridicule women who fall victim to this grotesque practice.
By Katie JgIn — Written on Feb 26, 2023
A popular Twitch streamer Brandon Ewing — also known as Atrioc — issued a public apology after being caught creating and watching non-consensual AI-generated porn.
And not just of anyone, but of several of his female colleagues, some of which he knows personally.
This is what one of them, known online as QTCinderella, said about the toll this situation has taken on her during a live stream while being visibly shaken:
"Eff the constant exploitation and objectification of women. It’s exhausting. (…) This is what it looks like to feel violated; this is what it looks like to feel taken advantage of. This is what it looks like to see yourself naked against your will being spread all over the internet."
Another one tweeted:
Don’t know whether to cry, break stuff or laugh at this point.
Now, you’d think that it shouldn’t even have to be explained to anyone why these women feel this way. And why creating and spreading porn with someone’s face without their explicit consent is morally wrong and downright disgusting.
But it looks like that’s just wishful thinking.
And some people’s reaction — mostly men’s, from what I’ve seen — wasn’t to sympathize with the female streamers but to seek out said pornographic content, share it with others and even ridicule them for getting upset about it.
Some also suggested they’re just being ‘fragile’ and ‘overly sensitive.’ And some others that they shouldn’t find it surprising because ‘once you put yourself out there, you have no control anymore’ and ‘that’s just what happens if you’re a woman.’
Right. But these reactions are hardly shocking, are they?
The rise of AI-powered deepfake and ‘nudifying’ tools
Deep fake porn is neither new nor, unfortunately, particularly rare.
Ever since its inception in 2018, many women — including celebrities like Taylor Swift or Scarlett Johansson but also ordinary ones — have had their faces superimposed into existing porn videos using open-source machine learning tools.
If you looked closely, it certainly didn’t look perfect.
But it looked believable enough.
So believable, in fact, that some of these deepfake sex tapes were weaponized to silence, degrade and humiliate women. To hurt their interpersonal relationships, reputation, mental health, and job prospects. As a result, some had to change their names. And some others had to remove themselves from the internet out of fear of being re-traumatized.
Because even if you’ve successfully removed it from one site, there’s no guarantee someone who already had it saved won’t repost it elsewhere on the internet.
According to a recent report, at the end of 2020, roughly 85,000 deep fake videos were circulating online. Unsurprisingly, between 90% and 95% of them were non-consensual porn, and about 90% featured women.
And although some sites — like Pornhub and Reddit — have banned this type of content, and some countries have started introducing new cyber sexual exploitation laws, I’m afraid not a great deal has changed since then.
Well, actually, now it’s even easier to ‘pornify’ and ‘nudify’ whoever you want.
Because practically every few months, there’s a new weapon of gendered online violence popping out of obscure corners of the internet that, as opposed to just a few years ago, require little to no technological know-how.
There are multiple AI-powered ‘nudifying’ tools you can use to strip naked any girl or woman you’d like in a matter of seconds. And deepfake porn sites where you can watch your favorite female celebrities having sex. Some of these also allow you to ‘customize’ the videos or pictures to feature anyone you’d like in them — your friends, co-workers, acquaintances, and strangers you meet in passing.
Most recently, an AI-powered app called Lensa took the internet by storm by promising users to turn their selfies into semi-realistic avatars of themselves as anime characters and fantasy heroes. But if you happen to be a woman, chances are the images you’ll get will be highly sexualized.
I tried it as well, and despite submitting only headshots of myself, I got one image in which I look almost entirely… naked.
And since anyone can upload pictures of anybody else on the app, you can easily generate near-realistic soft porn ‘magical’ imagery of anyone you want without the consent or knowledge of the person whose images you’re using.
How lovely.
It’s obvious why it’s mostly women being targeted
The fact that all these websites and tools were created — most of them clearly for malicious purposes — it’s one thing. But it’s another that so many men seemingly see no issue with that whatsoever.
Because ‘that’s just something that happens nowadays.’
And if women and girls don’t want their faces superimposed into porn scenes, they should… never post any pictures or videos of themselves online. Or better yet, don’t ever do anything using the internet because you never know if someone is going to hack into your inbox or messaging app and then use whatever they can find there to harass you anyway.
This logic sounds awfully familiar, though, doesn’t it?
Women are often told to accept whatever crap is thrown at them. Get used to it. Suck it up. That’s just what happens when you’re a woman. And it’s probably our fault anyway.
Unfortunately, our society continues to routinely devalue, shame, blame, objectify and hypersexualize women and then gaslight us when we dare to speak about the extent of this devaluation, victim-blaming, objectification, and hyper-sexualization.
Because if you’re speaking up about the problem, somehow you are the problem. Sigh.
Call me crazy, but if a specific phenomenon is not only highly gendered — as mentioned before, more than 90% of deepfake victims are women — but has already proven to be harmful, we shouldn’t just ‘suck it up’ and never try to understand why it happens and why so many men think of it as a non-issue.
In the case of non-consensual, sexually explicit content and other types of online harassment and violence, the reason this happens predominantly to women is pretty obvious: it’s the continuation of the unwanted objectification and sexualization we face in the real world.
And the reason why we’re told to get used to it is simply that some men — and likely some women — don’t see women as full human beings. Instead, they only see us as objects they’re entitled to manipulate and force to do anything they want.
So why would they care that we haven’t consented to it? That we perhaps don’t want to be turned into a horny teenage boy fantasy and f***ed by a giant tentacle or portrayed in some other, equally disturbing way?
But that right here is the crux of the matter.
You can outlaw these practices all you want. Still, unless you also challenge the culture of rampant misogyny and sexism that’s to blame for the continuous subjugation of women, you’re never really going to eradicate the problem of deepfake porn. At least not entirely.
We shouldn’t have to pay the price for just existing
It should be enough to say: if someone didn’t consent to do XYZ, you don’t do it.
That’s it. It’s that painfully simple.
There shouldn’t even be a debate on whether a non-consensual activity is morally repugnant or not. But the fact that there’s one is a stark reminder that we still don’t consider women’s lack of consent as important.
And whether it’s in the online or offline world, women continue to have to pay the price for that.
As a woman on the internet myself — although nowhere near as popular as these female Twitch streamers — I experience a staggering amount of uninvited harassment as well.
From unsolicited d*ck pics and videos of men masturbating to creepy voice notes in my DM’s, I’m reminded almost every day that to so many men, my mere existence online is an invitation to cross every boundary possible. And that’s just on top of all the ‘regular stuff’ — rape threats, death threats, and bullying.
Cyber violence and harassment against women are sadly not that uncommon. It’s an increasing problem worldwide, and it now affects the majority of women and girls online. Yup, that’s right.
And the rise of realistic deepfake AI porn is not only making an already dire situation worse but will inevitably push the boundaries of the ongoing cyber sexual exploitation and violence crisis, possibly beyond what we can even imagine.
So yes, we do need to have a very loud and public debate on all this. And more people need to be aware of how trivially easy it is to fabricate believable videos or pictures of people doing things they never did. Even having sex.
That hardly solves it all, of course.
And the bad news is that there’s no easy fix to the malicious use of this technology. But it can still be countered.
For instance, by adopting better anti-cyber exploitation laws and ensuring the victims aren’t left with little to no legal recourse as their lives are turned upside down. And by developing technology to detect fake videos and moderate what’s fake and what isn’t, which, in turn, could eventually help to ban this type of content from most corners of the internet.
As disheartening as it is to see the reactions of so many men to this recent deepfake AI porn controversy, it’s not surprising in the slightest.
Because what lies at the root of this situation — disregard for women’s consent and autonomy — is the same thing that underpins many other issues, like the removal of women’s reproductive freedom or the criminal justice system continuing to fail sexual assault victims.
And so if we ever really want to fix all that, we also need to fight against misogynistic norms and beliefs that contribute to it.
Otherwise, it’s like fighting violent floods with a sandbag levy.
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Katie Jgln is a writer, satirist, social scientist, and activist whose work covers gender equality issues, pop culture, and trending news. She has bylines in Scary Mommy, Daily Mail, and others.
This article was originally published at Medium. Reprinted with permission from the author.