The year deepfakes went mainstream

In 2018, Sam Cole, a reporter at Motherboard, discovered a new and disturbing corner of the internet. A Reddit user by the name of "deepfakes" was posting nonconsensual fake porn videos using an AI algorithm to swap celebrities' faces into real porn. Cole sounded the alarm on the phenomenon, right as the technology was about to explode. A year later, deepfake porn had spread far beyond Reddit, with easily accessible apps that could "strip" clothes off any woman photographed. Since then deepfakes have had a bad rap, and rightly so.