A man sits close to a microphone stand. Tears fill his eyes. He puts his head in his hands. “It’s so embarrassing,” he says. “It’s gross and I’m sorry.” Behind him, his wife wipes away tears with a crumpled tissue.
A few days earlier, Brandon Ewing – known as “Atrioc” to his followers on the streaming platform Twitch – had shared his screen during a live video. One of the visible open tabs showed a paid-access porn site specialising in AI-generated sexual images, otherwise known as “deepfakes”. Viewers of the stream screenshotted the leak, then widely shared the site, images from it, and the names of the women who were deepfaked. Ewing had accidentally revealed he had been looking at deepfake pornography of two other popular Twitch streamers, Maya Higa and Pokimane. Neither had consented to their likenesses being used for sexually explicit material.
