But for other women, especially those in more conservative or patriarchal environments, appearing in a deepfake-porn video could be profoundly stigmatizing, even career- or life-threatening.Īs if to underscore video makers’ compulsion to punish women who speak out, one of the videos to which Google alerted me depicts me with Hillary Clinton and Greta Thunberg. I am somewhat inured to this abuse, after researching and writing about it for years. Although they may provide cheap thrills for the viewer, their deeper purpose is to humiliate, shame, and objectify women, especially women who have the temerity to speak out. But these videos aren’t meant to be convincing-all of the websites and the individual videos they host are clearly labeled as fakes.

In some moments, the original performer’s mouth is visible while the deepfake Frankenstein moves and my face flickers. Whoever created the videos likely used a free “face swap” tool, essentially pasting my photo onto an existing porn video. government portrait, taken when I was six months pregnant. The images don’t look much like me the generative-AI models that spat them out seem to have been trained on my official U.S. In subsequent months, at least three artificially generated videos that appear to show me engaging in sex acts were uploaded to websites specializing in deepfake porn. Last year, I resigned as head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board, a policy-coordination body that the Biden administration let founder amid criticism mostly from the right. Read: We haven’t seen the worst of fake news

Yet policy makers have all but ignored an urgent AI problem that is already affecting many lives, including mine. Many commentators have been tying themselves in knots over the potential threats posed by artificial intelligence-deepfake videos that tip elections or start wars, job-destroying deployments of ChatGPT and other generative technologies. The only emotion I felt as I informed my lawyers about the latest violation of my privacy was a profound disappointment in the technology-and in the lawmakers and regulators who have offered no justice to people who appear in porn clips without their consent. For more than a year, I have been the target of a widespread online harassment campaign, and deepfake porn-whose creators, using artificial intelligence, generate explicit video clips that seem to show real people in sexual situations that never actually occurred-has become a prized weapon in the arsenal misogynists use to try to drive women out of public life. Recently, a Google Alert informed me that I am the subject of deepfake pornography.

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