Science

New California bill makes it illegal to create deepfake porn of someone without their consent


California bill makes it illegal to create deepfake porn of someone without their consent, with penalty of up to $150,000

  • Subjects of deepfake porn can now sue for damages up to $150,000 
  • Approximately 96 percent of deepfake videos are porn 
  • Another law bans use of deepfake political videos within 60 days of elections

A new California law will ban the creation and distribution of deepfake pornography produced without the consent of the person it depicts. 

Statutory damages range between $1,500 and $30,000, while cases in which malice can be demonstrated, damages rise to $150,000.

The bill is part of a larger deepfake package that will also make it illegal to create and distribute deepfake videos of political figures within 60 days of an election.

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Katy Perry's face (pictured above) was swapped onto an adult film actress' body for a short video, something that the new California law will make illegal.

Katy Perry’s face (pictured above) was swapped onto an adult film actress’ body for a short video, something that the new California law will make illegal.

Almost all deepfake videos are circulated online are pornographic, with one study suggesting the figure is 96 percent.   

Deepfakes are made using deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence, to create fake videos of a target individual.

They are made by feeding a computer an algorithm, or set of instructions, as well as lots of images and audio of the target person.

The computer program then learns how to mimic the person’s facial expressions, mannerisms, voice and inflections.

With enough video and audio of someone, you can combine a fake video of a person with fake audio and get them to say anything you want.

The California law is a response the the rapidly emerging field of socially and politically disruptive deepfake videos.

In February, Pornhub, Twitter, and Reddit all banned deepfake porn after a new app led to a dramatic increase in the amount of fake videos circulating on the networks.

The app in question, Fake App, allowed users to create their own deepfake porn videos in a few simple steps on their desktop.

A side-by-side comparison of a real Mark Zuckerberg video (left) and a deepfake video (right).

A side-by-side comparison of a real Mark Zuckerberg video (left) and a deepfake video (right).

The app’s ease of use made it popular, and drove to an explosion of fake videos featuring Daisy Ridley, Gal Gadot, Emma Watson, Jessica Alba and others.

The ban hasn’t proven particularly effective on Pornhuhb, as users continued to upload celebrity deepfakes to the video sharing platform.

‘Content that is flagged on Pornhub that directly violates our Terms of Service is removed as soon as we are made aware of it; this includes non-consensual content,’ company VP Corey Price said in a statement in February.

HOW DOES FACE-SWAPPING AI WORK?

A team led by Stanford University scientists has created an AI that can swap the facial movements of a person in one video to the subject of another.

The AI works by first analysing the intricate facial movements of a target, whose likeness will be used in the fake video.

It picks out the target’s head tilts, eye motion, mouth details, blinks and learns their typical movements.

The software then analyses these same landmarks on a face in a source video – the one whose movements will be swapped to the target.

After it captures the nuanced facial movements of the source, the AI reproduces them using the target’s own, natural expressions.

This creates a strikingly realistic fake clip because the target’s normal face movements and ticks are emulated.

The AI learns using an Adverserial Neural Network, a relatively new type of AI that rapidly trains itself to recognise patterns in data.

Two AIs are pitched against one another, one to create, the other to analyse, in a string of millions of back-and-forth adjustments.

This makes the learning process quicker and more accurate than if a human were to analyse each of the AI’s attempts. 

Over the summer, DeepNude, an AI-driven app that created fake nude images of women based on real photos, became unexpectedly popular.

The app creator pulled the app after being widely criticized, but clones of the app are still easily accessible.

Images created by an AI show how deepfake technology can be convincingly used in any medium, from photography to oil painting.

Images created by an AI show how deepfake technology can be convincingly used in any medium, from photography to oil painting.

In July, the House of Representatives considered federal measures to ban deepfake videos.

‘Now is the time for social media companies to put in place policies to protect users from this kind of misinformation not in 2021 after viral deepfakes have polluted the 2020 elections. By then it will be too late,’ Adam Schiff said during a July hearing on deepfakes.

 



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