Skip to main content

Slashdot: Inside the Deepfake Porn Economy

Inside the Deepfake Porn Economy
Published on March 31, 2023 at 01:30AM
The nonconsensual deepfake economy has remained largely out of sight, but it's easily accessible, and some creators can accept major credit cards. From a report: Digitally edited pornographic videos featuring the faces of hundreds of unconsenting women are attracting tens of millions of visitors on websites, one of which can be found at the top of Google search results. The people who create the videos charge as little as $5 to download thousands of clips featuring the faces of celebrities, and they accept payment via Visa, Mastercard and cryptocurrency. While such videos, often called deepfakes, have existed online for years, advances in artificial intelligence and the growing availability of the technology have made it easier -- and more lucrative -- to make nonconsensual sexually explicit material. An NBC News review of two of the largest websites that host sexually explicit deepfake videos found that they were easily accessible through Google and that creators on the websites also used the online chat platform Discord to advertise videos for sale and the creation of custom videos. The deepfakes are created using AI software that can take an existing video and seamlessly replace one person's face with another's, even mirroring facial expressions. Some lighthearted deepfake videos of celebrities have gone viral, but the most common use is for sexually explicit videos. According to Sensity, an Amsterdam-based company that detects and monitors AI-developed synthetic media for industries like banking and fintech, 96% of deepfakes are sexually explicit and feature women who didn't consent to the creation of the content. Most deepfake videos are of female celebrities, but creators now also offer to make videos of anyone. A creator offered on Discord to make a 5-minute deepfake of a "personal girl," meaning anyone with fewer than 2 million Instagram followers, for $65.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Slashdot: Battery Fires At Recycling Centres Are Costing the UK £1bn a Year

Battery Fires At Recycling Centres Are Costing the UK £1bn a Year Published on 2026-08-23T00:29:00Z Wrongly discarded lithium batteries, such as those in vapes, are causing more than 10 fires a week at U.K. recycling centers, according to figures shared with the Guardian: The Environment Services Association (ESA), the trade body for waste management companies, said its members had reported 1,518 fires in the year to March 2026. At least 541 of these fires were directly attributed to lithium ion batteries, the survey found. There were a further 216 battery fires in bin lorries [garbage trucks]. The ESA said the reported number of battery-related fires underestimated the scale of the problem, because in most incidents it was impossible to determine the cause of the blaze. A spokesperson said: "We know 40% of fires at recycling centres are caused by batteries, but we think the actual number is more like 70%." It estimates that annual cost of these fires has increased from ...

Slashdot: How the FSF Sysadmins are Blocking Botnets with reaction

How the FSF Sysadmins are Blocking Botnets with reaction Published on 2026-07-11T21:47:00Z For nearly two years the Free Software Foundation has been fighting web crawlers (including many aggressively scraping training data for AI models). A botnet controlling about five million IPs hit one system for six months in 2025. Their systems administrator wrote this week that they view these as distributed denial-of-service attacks. How are they fighting back? We noticed patterns in the scrapers that were abnormal, which gave us material for writing regular expressions. Searching for the regular expression then gave us a large lists of IP addresses. Looking up the origin of those IP addresses revealed that some of the crawlers were using botnets of residential IP addresses to scrape faster and avoid detection. We looked for what kinds of botnets might be generating the kind of traffic that we were seeing, and one that we suspected was called the "Vo1d" botnet, comprised of sma...

Slashdot: AT&T Outlines $250 Billion US Investment Plan To Boost Infrastructure In AI Age

AT&T Outlines $250 Billion US Investment Plan To Boost Infrastructure In AI Age Published on 2026-03-10T20:00:00Z AT&T plans to invest more than $250 billion over the next five years to expand U.S. telecom infrastructure for the AI age. The company says it will also hire thousands of technicians while partnering with AST SpaceMobile to extend coverage to remote areas. Reuters reports: Rapid adoption of artificial intelligence, cloud computing and connected devices has prompted telecom operators to invest heavily in fiber and 5G networks as they also seek to fend off intensifying competition from cable broadband providers. AT&T, which has about 110,000 employees in the U.S., said the new hires will help build and maintain its infrastructure. The outlay includes capital expenditure and other spending, the company said. The spending will focus on expanding its fiber and wireless networks, including accelerating deployment of fiber broadband, 5G home internet and satellite co...