The Rise of Nonconsensual Deepfakes and the AI Tools Fighting Back

Wednesday - January 31 2024, 18:06 UTC - 9 months ago

Nonconsensual deepfakes have become a growing issue, with Taylor Swift's images being the latest targets. However, AI tools such as watermarks and protective shields offer some hope in fighting against deepfake porn.

Last week, sexually explicit images of Taylor Swift, one of the world’s biggest pop stars, went viral online. Millions of people viewed nonconsensual deepfake porn of Swift on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. X has since taken the drastic step of blocking all searches for Taylor Swift to try to get the problem under control.

This is not a new phenomenon: deepfakes have been around for years. However, the rise of generative AI has made it easier than ever to create deepfake pornography and sexually harass people using AI-generated images and videos.

Of all types of harm related to generative AI, nonconsensual deepfakes affect the largest number of people, with women making up the vast majority of those targeted, says Henry Ajder, an AI expert who specializes in generative AI and synthetic media.

Thankfully, there is some hope. New tools and laws could make it harder for attackers to weaponize people’s photos, and they could help us hold perpetrators accountable.

WATERMARKS .

Social media platforms sift through the posts that are uploaded onto their sites and take down content that goes against their policies. But this process is patchy at best and misses a lot of harmful content, as the Swift videos on X show. It is also hard to distinguish between authentic and AI-generated content.

One technical solution could be watermarks. Watermarks hide an invisible signal in images that helps computers identify if they are AI generated. For example, Google has developed a system called SynthID, which uses neural networks to modify pixels in images and adds a watermark that is invisible to the human eye. That mark is designed to be detected even if the image is edited or screenshotted. In theory, these tools could help companies improve their content moderation and make them faster to spot fake content, including nonconsensual deepfakes.

Pros: .

- Watermarks could be a useful tool that makes it easier and quicker to identify AI-generated content and identify toxic posts that should be taken down.

- Including watermarks in all images by default would also make it harder for attackers to create nonconsensual deepfakes to begin with, says Sasha Luccioni, a researcher at the AI startup Hugging Face who has studied bias in AI systems.

Cons: .

- These systems are still experimental and not widely used. And a determined attacker can still tamper with them.

- Companies are also not applying the technology to all images across the board. Users of Google’s Imagen AI image generator can choose whether they want their AI-generated images to have the watermark, for example. All these factors limit their usefulness in fighting deepfake porn.

PROTECTIVE SHIELDS .

At the moment, all the images we post online are free game for anyone to use to create a deepfake. And because the latest image-making AI systems are so sophisticated, it is growing harder to prove that AI-generated content is fake.

But a slew of new defensive tools allow people to protect their images from AI-powered exploitation by making them look warped or distorted in AI systems.

One such tool, called PhotoGuard, was developed by researchers at MIT. It workrs by identifying the points of a person’s face and adjusting the facial landmarks minimally. This process is important as AI relies on very accurate and detailed images, so the subtlety of these changes can be enough to throw AI systems off track when trying to create a convincing deepfake.