AI can now create fake porn, making revenge porn even more complicated

In January this year, a new app was released that gives users the ability to swap out faces in a video with a different face obtained from another photo or video – similar to Snapchat's "face swap" feature. It's an everyday version of the kind of high-tech computer-generated imagery (CGI) we see in the movies. You might recognise it from the cameo of a young Princess Leia in the 2016 Star Wars film Rogue One, which used the body of another actor and footage from the first Star Wars film created 39 years earlier. Now, anyone with a high-powered computer, a graphics processing unit (GPU) and time on their hands can create realistic fake videos – known as "deepfakes" – using artificial intelligence (AI). The problem is that these same tools are accessible to those who seek to create non-consensual pornography of friends, work colleagues, classmates, ex-partners and complete strangers – and post it online. Read more: The picture of who is affected by'revenge porn' is more complex than we first thought In December 2017, Motherboard broke the story of a Reddit user known as "deep fakes", who used AI to swap the faces of actors in pornographic videos with the faces of well-known celebrities.