Julia, 21, has received fake nude photos of herself generated by artificial intelligence. The phenomenon is exploding.
“I’d already heard about deepfakes and deepnudes (…) but I wasn’t really aware of it until it happened to me. It was a slightly anecdotal event that happened in other people’s lives, but it wouldn’t happen in mine”, thought Julia, a 21-year-old Belgian marketing student and semi-professional model.
At the end of September 2023, she received an email from an anonymous author. Subject: "Realistic? “We wonder which photo would best resemble you”, she reads.
Attached were five photos of her.
In the original content, posted on her social networks, Julia poses dressed. In front of her eyes are the same photos. Only this time, Julia is completely naked.
Julia has never posed naked. She never took these photos. The Belgian model realises that she has been the victim of a deepfake.
I need you to understand that this will never happen.
You are never going to get this cat back in the bag.
The power to magically draw anything fits in a couple gigabytes. That model was trained on labeled images, mostly just stuff grabbed from the internet. Training used commercial video cards.
If you magically erased all existing software, for this technology, it would be back to last year’s standards, by next year. Lone randos already churn out and share models for niche webcomic characters and… N64 games. You can recreate any damn thing you have examples of. All of this is shockingly well democratized, and the training process is only going to get easier and more powerful.
And lone randos’ computers might contain commercial photography featuring naked people.