If anything, I'm surprised that this wasn't created sooner.

Additionally, entire communities exist around shopping celebrities' heads onto naked bodies; this has been a thing approximately forever but no one really cared. Now that it's automated it's "absolutely terrifying"? Like the author said, anyone with a few hours of photoshop training can do the same, it's just faster now.

That being said, news articles like this will be key to generating enough fear to pass legislation about what we can and can't do with software. Not sure if that's a good thing.

This software is just a precursor to what could be possible in the future. You could conceivably tell the software a caption and it would generate a video for you. How can you control what software someone runs offline locally? You can't. I find it irrational to even think of such legislation.

Posting such generated content online is another matter though. It would probably already violate some preexisting laws.

> How can you control what software someone runs offline locally? You can't. I find it irrational to even think of such legislation.

This is what DRM and Content ID are. They're not perfect, but plenty are trying, and it does stop most non-technical people.

I don't think you have thought it through. Those work using a blacklist only. First, you can't force people to run DRM on their system. Even if you could, the ML based generator will always generate some new and random that foils the DRM. You will basically need to force people to run an ML model on their system which serves as an intelligent dyanmic DRM, and thia dictatorial idea is acceptable nowhere.

I don't get the horror -- it's not the woman's actual body. And even if it were, it's just a body and maybe we shouldn't freak out about it. If we could somehow embrace "radical transparency" then it wouldn't make a difference if someone saw you naked, knew what gender's clothes you like to wear, what medical conditions you have, or anything else. If not that far, let's at least get rid of this puritanical nonsense where we can't see naked bodies, but it's fine to see extreme violence, etc. I agree that deep fakes will perhaps move us a step closer to not being shocked by images, and not believing anything we see or read online, which is probably good thing. Of course soon we'll all have to be naked save for gobs of SPF-1000 anyway...

I totally agree with this comment. "Ethics" needs disruption. We only have problems with nudity, because it is a tabu.

They sure have a lot of fake nude-but-censored photos in this article. I think one or two would have sufficed to show how the technology works.

I only saw two.

I see huge consequences as you pretty much frame any woman and there's nothing she can do about it. The problem is that perception matters. Many people who are not exposed to technology would not understand / believe that such app exists.

For example, if a person decides to grab a picture of a young teacher and post fake nudes, the teacher may be able to say that the pics are fake, but she might get fired anyway due to decisions made by the school board or PTA. This type of news might be picked up by the local news network and the story will be embellished out of proportions. Regardless of what she says and whether it's true, her reputation would already be tarnished. We've seen a lot of these happening with celebrities. It will be worse if it happens to normal people with no money to hire a PR company or go to court.

> "This is absolutely terrifying," Katelyn Bowden, founder and CEO of revenge porn activism organization Badass, told Motherboard. "Now anyone could find themselves a victim of revenge porn, without ever having taken a nude photo. This tech should not be available to the public."

Or maybe the opposite?

The transition to ubiquitous deep fakes will be very jarring to those who haven't been paying attention. In time, the shock value (and indeed interest) should fade into obscurity.

Pop stars upset about appearing in one of these deep fakes should be much more horrified about another possibility: eventually their talents will no longer be needed at all because it will be possible to produce content free of human placeholders and much more effective at generating money.

A photo of "any woman"? I think not. All the examples are of female celebrities who are 90% naked in the original photo.

Taylor swift in a skin-tight see-through strapless dress? Kardashian in a bikini? I'll call this thing dangerous when it can work from headshots or images of people in winter clothing.

What a great advertisement for the app. They were sure to identify the app and mention the cost.

Shocking, simply shocking.

You think this is terrifying, wait until it works in realtime with an augmented reality app.

there's desensitization. try a nude beach for an example

Nude beaches imply consent - most places are not nude beaches.

I think there's something about that. It may have just the opposite effect. Revenge porn ? "That's a deepfake".

> DeepNude also dispenses with the idea that this technology can be used for anything other than claiming ownership over women’s bodies.

That's not true! We can also use it for undermining democracy, making everything look like a Van Gough painting, and...

> This algorithm is similar to [...] what self-driving cars use to "imagine" road scenarios.

I understand the fear here, but I don't appreciate rage-bait sub-headlines that contradict the rest of the story. Obviously GANs can be used for many things.

Also, I'm sure there are a few bad actors who will use this for things like revenge porn (which is Not Good), but I suspect the driving demand behind this application is horny teenagers who think Daenerys from GoT is hot, rather than malicious people who want to "oppress women." Although to be fair, this is the effect the technology has, whether intended or not.

"I was high when he pitched it!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFNhP-dBK4E

Two thoughts:

1. Doesn't this make any genuine nude photo deniable?

2. I wonder if this is the killer app for augmented reality.

These are the killer apps for CGI graphics. In my future movies, people will commend my looks and but note the lackluster performance.

Here's how you could probably prove it.

If you're a victim of this software and you come across a photo of you created using it, then you could run the original clothed image through the same app.

If they produce exactly the same results, it's obviously a fake image created by this app, not a genuine nude image of you.

> 1. Doesn't this make any genuine nude photo deniable?

Deniable, sure, but what will denying it get you? If people wanted to rub it in your face, saying “it’s not real” won’t stop them. If your workplace is going to fire you because of it, denying it won’t stop them from firing you.

I think it will eventually make the whole of nude photos a non-issue. You'll only still get fired and shamed for it while this tech is still underground - once it's widely known, "nudes" won't matter more than any other photoshopped image.

You don't even need to deny anything, just make a nude photo of a person who wants to fire you.

> and only works on images of women.

Gamification shows up in some unlikely places

Nice vice spam. What's horrifying about a person being nude again or seeing a nude person? I get the novelty but this is not " absolutely terrifying"

While I would agree in principle that there's nothing shameful about nudity, in most societies, this is simply not the case. Having images circulated of oneself in the nude would be shaming, and I imagine that having these images faked makes one feel a loss of control over one's image.

The fact that this was only made to effectively "unclothe" women is also disturbing (if unsurprising).

Not sure it qualifies as "spam".

> Not sure it qualifies as "spam".

the amount of fake nudes in the page. clearly yellow attention grabbing

What’s horrifying is the part where the nude image is created and published without its subject’s knowledge or consent.

That's not the question - the question is what is horrifying to the person that is unwillingly having their altered picture circulated? It's about the feelings of the person being depicted.

ok but that has been happening for decades

Therefore what?

Consent.

People only see the downsides but there could be some really cool uses for the technology in image repair, think old paintings, damaged photos, etc. So while yes, this tech starts as unwilling pornography, it could turn into something generally usefully to society.

Obviously, they took an existing technology, and applied it to a different goal.

Yes, obviously every other comment is about how terrible it is, however no one focuses on the tech that's available unless you're already in the field. Not sure what about my comment set people off, I almost expect it's bleedover from a different thread since there's no responses other than yours. The tech itself is pretty cool, using data sets to model similar body types. I remember seeing this when it first came out and was being used to swap President Obama's speech. I'd expect that this will be used to model missing children better, it might lead to computerized assistance in facial and body reconstruction. The tech is pretty interesting.