There is no denying that technology has played a major role in our lives, whether it is talking to your near and dear ones while living thousands of miles away or even something as simple as calling a ride at the touch of a button. But, no matter how much of a boon technology may be to humankind, its misuse is tremendous as well.
The recent target of this abuse of technology was ‘Wonder Woman’ Gal Gadot. The whole world was shocked when a porn video went viral on the internet where the actress was seen in a compromising position.
However, the reality of the situation is that the video was created by a Reddit user ‘deepfakes’ who used a machine learning algorithm, an easily accessible software and open-source code to morph Gal Gadot’s face on the girl in the video.
The scary part is that such a video can be created by anyone who has a working knowledge of deep learning algorithms.
Motherboard got in touch with the user who told them that he used Google image search, stock photos, and YouTube videos to create it.
He also admitted to training the algorithm on porn videos and Gal Gadot’s face after which the nodes arrange themselves to convincingly manipulate the video.
He confessed that he was able to do this even though he’s not a professional researcher and is just a programmer with an interest in machine learning. Elaborating on his algorithm, he said,
“I just found a clever way to do face-swap. With hundreds of face images, I can easily generate millions of distorted images to train the network. After that, if I feed the network someone else’s face, the network will think it’s just another distorted image and try to make it look like the training face.”
While this method is not completely convincing, the software which he used is provided for free and is similar to the technology that was used by the makers of Fast and Furious to display Paul Walker’s performance post his death, in the film.
Grace Evangeline who works in the adult film industry also expressed shock at the complete disregard for consent, adding that she had never seen anything like it. She said,
“One important thing that always needs to happen is consent. Consent in private life as well as consent on film. Creating fake sex scenes of celebrities takes away their consent. It’s wrong.”
On being asked whether he considered any ethical implications while making the video, ‘deepfakes’ said that he believes any technology can be used for bad motivations and it’s not possible to stop that. However, he doesn’t believe that the average user should be kept aloof of the technology simply because it can be misused.
This is not the first video ‘deepfakes’ has created using the technology. Along with Gal Gadot, he has also made and uploaded porn videos with the faces of Scarlett Johansson, Maisie Williams, Taylor Swift and Aubrey Plaza, on his Reddit.
According to experts, 24 billion selfies were uploaded by people to Google photos in 2015-2016 alone. The softwares were made available to be used for research purposes. Instead, technology has advanced so much that the very integrity of innocent people is at stake.