Deepfakes: Reddit bans AI-generated fake celebrity porn

Chat forum came ‘under pressure’ after other sites introduced bans last week

Reddit
Message on the deepfakes subreddit chat forum
(Image credit: Reddit)

Reddit has joined a growing number of social networks in banning fake celebrity pornography generated by artificial intelligence (AI).

Celebrities whose likenesses have been used include Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot, Scarlett Johansson and Star Wars lead Daisy Ridley.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The practice was “brought to the wider public’s attention in December” through the deepfakes subreddit, which amassed more than 91,000 subscribers before it was banned, says BBC News.

According to the news site, Reddit had “been under growing pressure to act” after websites including Twitter, Gfycat and Pornhub introduced their own bans on mocked-up celebrity porn over the past week.

Visitors to the deepfakes subreddit are now met by a message saying the page violates the chat forum’s content policy, as it classes the shared material as “involuntary pornography”.

The forum told its users that it will be relying on “first-party reports” as a means to identify pornographic images created without the consent of those in them, although it will “take context into account” in each instance, The Verge reports.

According to Forbes, “not everything on the [deepfakes] subreddit was porn”, with some members simply “exploring” the technology.

For instance, the news website says, there were a number of videos where members had added Nicolas Cage to movies he hadn’t starred in by using AI software to place his face on the body of the original performer.

Explore More