This article contains descriptions of sex trafficking and abuse. For years, nonconsensual deepfake pornography has been used to harass, silence, shame, and abuse women. Celebrities and influencers have their faces implanted into existing adult videos; men have used the technology to place "friends" into explicit videos; and boys have allegedly created "nude" images of their female classmates. However, among the ever growing harassment and abuse, deepfake creators have now, arguably, hit a new low: using videos of sex trafficking victims as the basis of the nonconsensual videos. Over the past two months, an account on the largest deepfake sexual abuse website has posted 12 celebrity videos that are based on footage from GirlsDoPorn, a now-defunct sex trafficking operation that the US Department of Justice says its operators used to conspire and commit sex trafficking through "force, fraud, and coercion," tricking five women--and allegedly hundreds more-- into making sex videos that were subsequently posted online.

Encountering altered videos and photoshopped images is almost a rite of passage on the internet. It's rare these days that you'd visit social media and not come across some form of edited content -- whether that be a simple selfie with a filter, a highly embellished meme or a video edited to add a soundtrack or enhance certain elements. But while some forms of media are obviously edited, other alterations may be harder to spot. You may have heard the term "deepfake" in recent years -- it first came about in 2017 to describe videos and images that implement deep learning algorithms to create videos and images that look real. For example, take the moon disaster speech given by former president Richard Nixon when the Apollo 11 team crashed into the lunar surface.

The social media giant is putting $10 million into the "Deepfake Detection Challenge," which aims to spur detection research. As part of the project, Facebook is commissioning researchers to produce realistic deepfakes to create a data set for testing detection tools. The company said the videos, which will be released in December, will feature paid actors and that no user data would be utilized. In the run-up to the U.S. presidential election in November 2020, social platforms have been under pressure to tackle the threat of deepfakes, which use artificial intelligence to create hyper-realistic videos where a person appears to say or do something they did not. While there has not been a well-crafted deepfake video with major political consequences in the United States, the potential for manipulated video to cause turmoil was recently demonstrated by a "cheapfake" clip of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, manually slowed down to make her speech seem slurred.

The social media giant is putting $10 million into the "Deepfake Detection Challenge," which aims to spur detection research. As part of the project, Facebook is commissioning researchers to produce realistic deepfakes to create a data set for testing detection tools. The company said the videos, which will be released in December, will feature paid actors and that no user data would be utilized. In the run-up to the U.S. presidential election in November 2020, social platforms have been under pressure to tackle the threat of deepfakes, which use artificial intelligence to create hyper-realistic videos where a person appears to say or do something they did not. While there has not been a well-crafted deepfake video with major political consequences in the United States, the potential for manipulated video to cause turmoil was recently demonstrated by a "cheapfake" clip of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, manually slowed down to make her speech seem slurred.

The video showed the woman in a pink off-the-shoulder top, sitting on a bed, smiling a convincing smile. But it had been seamlessly grafted, without her knowledge or consent, onto someone else's body: a young pornography actress, just beginning to disrobe for the start of a graphic sex scene. A crowd of unknown users had been passing it around online. She felt nauseous and mortified: What if her co-workers saw it? Would it change how they thought of her? Would they believe it was a fake?

The video showed the woman in a pink off-the-shoulder top, sitting on a bed, smiling a convincing smile. But it had been seamlessly grafted, without her knowledge or consent, onto someone else's body: a young pornography actress, just beginning to disrobe for the start of a graphic sex scene. A crowd of unknown users had been passing it around online. She felt nauseous and mortified: What if her co-workers saw it? Would it change how they thought of her? Would they believe it was a fake?

The U.S. Defense Department is already preparing itself for the fight against deepfakes, fake audio and video created by artificial intelligence that burst into the mainstream last year thanks to sites like Reddit. According to MIT Technology Review, the development of tech to catch deepfakes is currently underway. Through the Media Forensics program run by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), researchers have already built some of the tools to expose these fake AI creations. The Media Forensics program was actually originally set up to automate existing forensic tools, however its mission changed due to the concern over the rise of deepfakes. The project's deepfake mission was announced earlier this year.

Artificial intelligence video tools make it relatively easy to put one person's face on another person's body with few traces of manipulation. I tried it on myself. The scene opened on a room with a red sofa, a potted plant and the kind of bland modern art you'd see on a therapist's wall. In the room was Michelle Obama, or someone who looked exactly like her. Wearing a low-cut top with a black bra visible underneath, she writhed lustily for the camera and flashed her unmistakable smile.