You too can be in porn. It wouldn't matter if you never considered a career in adult entertainment, or ever bared your body in front of a camera. All it takes to make a porn reel with you as the main actor is a few mugshots you are happy to share on social media, and a video editing software that can be downloaded for free. The resulting clip will be of terrifying quality, that is, everybody would be convinced that was you and your body in the footage.
Video editing tool freely available from Google
In December 2017 a Redditor named 'deepfakes' published online fragments of porn films, in which instead of porn actresses appeared Hollywood stars like Scarlett Johansson, Emma Watson, Macy Williams, Taylor Swift and Gal Gadot.
In all of these videos faces the porn actresses were replaced with a neural network with the appearance of celebrities. The creator of the videos stated he used TensorFlow, a video editing tool freely available from Google, using film stars' stock photos and videos posted on YouTube. As reported by Motherboard, “deepfakes” has been applying these tools to create content for the pornographic subreddit r/celebfakes directory. Using open-source AI software he pasted the faces of celebrities onto X-rated GIFS. He went so far as creating and posting a full video reel, since removed, where the face of Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot was inserted into an incest-themed porn scene.
Fake porn video creation is no longer rocket science
'deepfakes' later published on Reddit step-by-step instructions how to make such videos, as well as deepfakeapp, an application enabling the creation of videos without knowing even the basics of programming. As he explained, once two source videos are downloaded, at the first step the machine learning based program processes them separately and reports on the progress of the "training".
The software is based on multiple open-source libraries, such as Keras with TensorFlow backend. In the case of the Gal Gadot video, he trained the deep learning algorithm on porn videos and Gadot’s face. Once this training is completed, the nodes interconnected with both source videos arrange themselves to complete a particular task of manipulating video convincingly on the fly.
Totally convincing it is not going to be, as the result is unlikely to fool anyone who would give the reel a closer look. In numerous frames, the face doesn't track correctly the relevant body footage and a viewer can observe some uncanny valley effects. Nonetheless, at a glance, the video appears to be quite believable. Especially striking is to consider that these films are apparently the work of just one person, not of a large special effects studio. According to Motherboard it would not take that much of computing power, as Alex Champandard, an artificial intelligence researcher confirmed that a reasonably powerful consumer-grade graphics card could process such videos within hours, whereas less powerful CPU-integrated graphics would still do the job, but in a span of a few days.