Porn and the pope
The overall economy might not be in great shape, but the nonconsensual deepfake porn economy? That’s in rude health. AI-generated imagery has been around for a long time now but it’s recently become disturbingly sophisticated. See, for example, all the people who were taken in by the viral AI-generated photo of the pope in a puffy jacket, created by AI-based image generator Midjourney. The pope in an ostentatious coat may be amusing but the dark side of this technology is no laughing matter. A recent investigation by Kat Tenbarge at NBC News shows just how disturbingly pervasive and accessible nonconsensual deepfake porn has become.
You don’t need to go to the dark web or be particularly computer savvy to find deepfake porn. As NBC News found, two of the largest websites that host this content are easily accessible through Google. The website creators use the online chat platform Discord to advertise their wares and people can pay for it with Visa and Mastercard. Business is booming so much that “two popular deepfake creators are advertising for paid positions to help them create content”.
It comes as no surprise that it’s women who are largely affected by the rise of deepfake porn. A 2019 report by Sensity, a company which detects and monitors deepfakes, found that 96% of deepfakes were non-consensual sexual deepfakes, and of those, 99% featured women. Increasingly, the women targeted aren’t just celebrities – you can get deepfake porn made to order, featuring anyone you like. “A creator offered on Discord to make a five-minute deepfake of a ‘personal girl,’ meaning anyone with fewer than 2 million Instagram followers, for $65,” NBC reports.
The rise of deepfake porn – which has been facilitated by major companies – is already having a massive impact on ordinary people’s lives. Earlier this year a Twitch streamer called Brandon “Atrioc” Ewing admitted to buying and watching deepfake porn of his female colleagues. He only admitted to this, by the way, because he slipped up in a live stream and accidentally showed browser windows open to a website of someone who made deepfakes of streamers. After he was caught out, he issued a pretty terrible apology video (which featured his wife crying in the background) and claims to have wired a Los Angeles-based law firm “about $60,000” to cover any woman on Twitch who wanted to use their legal services to get those images and videos removed from websites.
One of the women allegedly targeted by the deepfake porn, streamer QTCinderella, spoke out about the toll it had taken on her mental health. “This is what it looks like to feel violated, this is what it looks like to feel taken advantage of,” she said in a 30 January live stream. “This is what it looks like to see yourself naked against your will being spread all over the internet,” she said. “It should not be part of my job to have to pay money to get this stuff taken down. It should not be part of my job to be harassed, to see pictures of me ‘nude’ spread around.”
No, it certainly shouldn’t be. And yet, increasingly, this is the reality of being a woman who is in the public eye even the smallest bit. You have to balance your work with the exhausting and sometimes expensive work of fighting back against nonstop harassment. The rise of AI-generated imagery has taken that harassment to hideous new heights. This isn’t just porn, it’s terrorism; it’s meant to punish and silence women.
Writing about all this is tricky because, depressingly, any sort of coverage risks directing more people to deepfake sites. After the Twitch controversy, for example, Google searches for deepfake porn boomed. Alas, at this point, however, there’s no putting the deepfake genie back in the bottle. What we desperately need is for lawmakers and technology companies to start seeing the problem of nonconsensual deepfake porn as the emergency it is and holding its creators and facilitators to account. That’s not happening anywhere near fast enough: at the moment, only four US states have passed legislation specifically about deepfakes. A lot of lives are going to get ruined before politicians sit up and start taking this seriously.
South Korea considering exploiting foreign maids to lift the birthrate
The nation is the only country in the world with a fertility rate below one (a South Korean woman can expect to have an average of 0.78 children) and the birth rate keeps falling. Desperate times call for desperate measures and the government has come up with a number of controversial ideas to increase the birthrate including exempting men who have three or more children by the age of 30 from compulsory military conscription. Another idea that has been floated is allowing foreign domestic workers to work in South Korea for less than the minimum wage. Just need a little bit of modern slavery and that birth rate will jump right up!
After a 1935 tragedy, a priest vowed to teach kids about menstruation
In 1935, a 13-year-old British girl killed herself after getting her first period. She had no idea what was happening to her and thought that God was punishing her. As the Washington Post writes in a fascinating piece, her death changed the life of Chad Varah, the young deacon who officiated her burial. He dedicated his life to overturning “stuffy” attitudes towards sexual health and founded a suicide-prevention charity. This story, which is almost a century old, is depressingly relevant again thanks to a Florida bill which would ban schools teaching about menstruation until sixth grade.
Fewer than a third of UN member states have ever had a female leader
Pew Research Center also notes that out of 193 member states of the UN, only 13 have female heads of government.
Thousands of elderly Swiss women bring European court’s first climate case
The groundbreaking case argues that their government’s “woefully inadequate” efforts to fight the climate crisis violate their human rights. Stefanie Brander, a member of Senior Women for Climate Protection, told Reuters that she thought the government had underestimated the group until now. “We were taken for old women who did not have a clear idea of the issues … and I think that could now turn against them,” she said.
The week in plantriarchy
Bad news for neglectful plant mums: a new study has found that plants “scream” when they’re stressed. Thirsty or damaged plants produce up to 50 staccato pops in an hour, apparently. One expert described the discovery as “exciting and thought-provoking”. I describe it “absolutely horrifying”. I’ve got enough to worry about, thank you. I don’t need to be stressing about my dying Fiddle Leaf Fig yelling at me.
