A pornographic sequence where we see a naked body, which we do not recognize, but whose face is familiar to us. The nose, the mouth, the eyes… No doubt, it’s ours.
This nightmare of unbelievable violence came true for Lena Mahfouf aka Lena Situations in the fifth episode of her August vlogs. ” It’s awful, it’s really disgusting the content creator exclaims when she discovers she is a victim fake porn. What is this illegal practice and what does the law say about it? Lighting.
What is a deepfake?
THE deepfakesOR ” deep fake in French, it is a multimedia synthesis technique that uses artificial intelligence to superimpose video or audio files on top of others in order to deceive the user who is watching them. In short, the deepfakes works like a photo montage but animated, so much more realistic.
We are talking about fake porn when a person’s face is superimposed on existing pornographic images. Like our colleagues from the SHEaccording to a 2019 study by Dutch AI company Sensity, “ 96% of online fake videos are non-consensual pornography, and most of them star women: celebrities like singer Taylor Swift and actress Emma Watson, but also a lot of women who don’t occupy the media spotlight. »
This dangerous technology is the perfect tool to create revenge porn in spades, with a subterfuge sometimes difficult to spot even by an expert eye.
Where does this technology come from?
According to the database manager’s site Oraclewe owe the creation of the deepfakes to a technique invented in 2014 by researcher Ian Goodfellow:
This is GAN (Generative Adverarial Networks). According to this technology, two algorithms train each other: one tries to make counterfeits as reliable as possible; the other attempts to detect forgeries. In this way, both algorithms improve together over time through their respective training. The more samples you have available, the more you improve them.
The deepfake phenomenon was officially born in the fall of 2017 and appeared on the Reddit website. Since 2017, the number of deepfakes has increased dramatically. According to Deeptrace researchers, the number of deepfake videos found online in 2019 was around 15,000, up from just under 8,000 videos recorded a year earlier.
The most worrying thing about all this is that you don’t need any special computer knowledge to create a file deepfakes. Different applications and tutorials allow you to do it easily, with a result to go wrong.
2019 marked a turning point in the history of deepfakes pornographic, when a Reddit user popularized a technique for pasting the faces of female celebrities onto pornographic videos on the forum.
Are deepfakes punished by French law?
This technology raises the issue of consent and image rights. Considered a form of cyberbullying, the psychological impact is not negligible, says Karen Hao, editor-in-chief of MIT Technology Review, which is interested in the feelings of the victims of this false content. She writes :
“On a psychological level, these videos can feel as violent as revenge porn (true and intimate videos filmed or released without consent)”
However, the law struggles to regulate the matter. Since 2002, article 226-8 of the penal code provides that “ is punished with one year’s imprisonment and a fine of 15,000 euros for having published, by whatever means, the montage made with the words or image of a person without his or her consent, if it is not clear that it is a meeting or if it is not expressly mentioned. »
But, as today it is extremely difficult to identify the authors of these deepfakesit is almost impossible to punish them.
Source: Madmoizelle
Mary Crossley is an author at “The Fashion Vibes”. She is a seasoned journalist who is dedicated to delivering the latest news to her readers. With a keen sense of what’s important, Mary covers a wide range of topics, from politics to lifestyle and everything in between.
