A creepy new app is gaining in popularity on social media. The app allows users to superimpose a star’s face on a porn actor’s body. The technology has privacy implications for consumers everywhere.
The app was first introduced in December 2017, and soon porn videos popped up on websites featuring celebrity faces on porn actor’s bodies.
Celebrities have been secretly battling porn websites to remove the videos that appears to show them engaging in sex acts in shocking hi-def detail.
According to Newsweek.com, the technology can be traced back to Reddit.com subgroup “deepfakes” and involves a machine learning algorithm that swaps celebrity faces onto porn actresses bodies in adult films.
Until now, the tools used to make the videos were proprietary and reserved for Reddit’s deepfakes subgroup users. But now the tools are available online and social media users are using the app to superimpose star’s faces and create their own porn videos.
One video making the rounds shows boxer Mike Tyson and rapper Snoop Dogg’s faces superimposed on the bodies of Oprah Winfrey and her bestie Gayle King. The video is taken from an old episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Computer scientists warn that the technology will one day be used to fake videos of famous figures or anyone else for extortion purposes.
“The technology could advance beyond pornography and one day be used to to make famous figures appear to say and do things that they really haven’t,” NY Magazine reported last year.
A user in the Reddit subgroup defends the new technology.
“The work that we create here in this community is not with malicious intent. Quite the opposite,” wrote Reddit user Gravity_Horse on the deepfakes Reddit page. “We are painting with revolutionary, experimental technology, one that could quite possibly shape the future of media and creative design.”
