If there is no red line around AI-generated sex abuse, then no line exists. For more than a week, beginning late last month, anyone could go online and use a tool owned and promoted by the world's richest man to modify a picture of basically any person, even a child, and undress them. This was not some deepfake nudify app that you had to pay to download on a shady backwater website or a dark-web message board. This was Grok, a chatbot built into X--ostensibly to provide information to users but, thanks to an image-generating update, transformed into a major producer of nonconsensual sexualized images, particularly of women and children. The forced undressings happened out in the open, in one stretch thousands of times every hour, on a popular social network where journalists, politicians, and celebrities post.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Had you scanned any of the latest headlines around the TAKE IT DOWN Act, legislation that President Donald Trump signed into law Monday, you would have come away with a deeply mistaken impression of the bill and its true purpose. The surface-level pitch is that this is a necessary law for addressing nonconsensual intimate images--known more widely as revenge porn. Obfuscating its intent with a classic congressional acronym (Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Networks), the TAKE IT DOWN Act purports to help scrub the internet of exploitative, nonconsensual sexual media, whether real or digitally mocked up, at a time when artificial intelligence tools and automated image generators have supercharged its spread. Enforcement is delegated to the Federal Trade Commission, which will give online communities that specialize primarily in user-generated content (e.g., social media, message boards) a heads-up and a 48-hour takedown deadline whenever an appropriate example is reported.

Heritage Foundation tech policy director Kara Frederick joins'America's Newsroom' to discuss pornographic AI photos of Taylor Swift sparking conversations about deepfake regulation. A bill aimed at outlawing "revenge porn" has been approved by lawmakers in the Massachusetts House and Senate and shipped to Democratic Gov. Maura Healey, a move advocates say was long overdue. If signed by Healey, the bill -- which bars the sharing of explicit images or videos without the consent of those depicted in the videos -- would leave South Carolina as the only state not to have a law specifically banning revenge porn. Supports say the bill, which landed on Healey's desk Thursday, would align Massachusetts with the other 48 states that have clear prohibitions on disseminating sexually explicit images and videos without the subject's consent. It is a form of abuse that advocates say has grown increasingly common in the digital age, subjecting people to social and emotional harm often inflicted by former romantic partners.

In the ad, a woman in a white lace dress makes suggestive faces at the camera, and then kneels. But if you saw the video in the wild, you might not know that it's a deepfake fabrication. It would just look like a video, like the opening shots of some cheesy, low-budget internet porn. In top right corner, as the video loops, there is a still image of the actress Emma Watson, taken when she was a teenager, from a promotional shoot for the Harry Potter movies. It's her face that has been pasted on to the porn performer's.

From the beginning, deepfakes, or AI-generated synthetic media, have primarily been used to create pornographic representations of women, who often find this psychologically devastating. The original Reddit creator who popularized the technology face-swapped female celebrities' faces into porn videos. To this day, the research company Sensity AI estimates, between 90% and 95% of all online deepfake videos are nonconsensual porn, and around 90% of those feature women. As the technology has advanced, numerous easy-to-use no-code tools have also emerged, allowing users to "strip" the clothes off female bodies in images. Many of these services have since been forced offline, but the code still exists in open-source repositories and has continued to resurface in new forms.

While it looks like another tale of internet magic, it points to something darker stirring in the internet's depths. This story was originally published August 19, 2019. The video exists thanks to deepfake technology and while its realism is still in its infancy, it's fast becoming one of the most terrifying developments in technology. To better understand how it works and what it means the future, we peeked under the covers. A update to Virginia, U.S.A.'s law against revenge porn banning the distribution of videos and images that have been deepfaked - modified using machine learning algorithms to picture someone else - or otherwise created with the intent to "coerce, harass, or intimidate" a victim went into effect on Tuesday, per CNET.

Samuel Greengard is an author and journalist based in West Linn, OR, USA.

Imagine seeing yourself in a sexually explicit video in which you have never participated. This is a distinct possibility today for a female celebrity or a regular woman living in the age of Deepfakes. Deepfake is a technique used to manipulate human images based on artificial intelligence. What sets Deepfake images or videos apart from other modified images is that the former looks strikingly authentic. Earlier this year, a Deepfake video that went viral showed comedian Bill Hader's face being seamlessly transformed into that of Tom Cruise.

Facebook first started trialling a system to combat revenge porn late last year, but it had one rather scary aspect: you had to upload your own nudes so the platform knew which images it should block. The earlier system, which is still in use and set for expanded rollout, relied on users uploading photos they were afraid might be shared, allowing Facebook to create a digital fingerprint to block uploads of matching images. You send the nude to yourself in Messenger, and Facebook creates a hashed digital fingerprint of the photo – an encrypted version of the raw data in the image file. Anytime someone tries to upload a photo, it is checked against that fingerprint and rejected if it matches. Facebook says its new AI-based system is designed to automatically detect nude or near-nude images, before passing them for a human moderator to decide whether the photo or video should be blocked.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. Photoshopping celebrities' faces onto nude photos has been around for years. Now, new technology has spawned a more sinister upgrade to that practice--and it has online communities scrambling to keep nonconsensual adult content off their platforms. This week, Reddit, Twitter, and Pornhub became the latest social platforms to ban deepfakes--fake porn videos in which artificial intelligence superimposes celebrities' (and other people's) faces onto the bodies of adult film actors. With free and easy-to-use facial recognition technology, users can create videos that are nearly indecipherable from reality.