The disturbring rise of sexual deepfakes
Deepfakes are a worry in digital development in this age of rapid technical advancement. This article delves deeply into the workings of deepfake technology, exposing both its potential dangers and its constantly changing capabilities.
The manipulation of images and videos to make sexually oriented content may be considered a criminal offense across all the European Union nations.
The first directive on violence against will move through its final approval stage by April 2024.
With the help of AI programs, these images are being modified to undress women without their consent.
What changes will the new directive bring? And what will happen if the women who live in the European Union are the target of manipulation but the attacks happen in countries outside the European Nation?
The victims: Women
If you are wondering how easy it is to create sexual deepfakes, some websites are just a click away and provide free-of-cost services.
According to the 2023 State of Deepfakes research, it takes around 25 minutes to create a sexual deepfake, and it's free. You just need a photo and the face has to be visible.
A sample of 95000 deepfake videos were analyzed between 2019 and 2023, and the research discloses that there has been a disturbing 550% increase.
AI and Deepfakes expert Henry Aider says the people who use these stripping tools want to humiliate, defame, traumatize, and in some incidents, sexual pleasure.
“And it's important to state that these synthetic stripping tools do not work on men. They are explicitly designed to target women. So it's a good example of a technology that is explicitly malicious. There's nothing neutral about that,” says Henry.
The makers of nude deepfakes search for their target's pictures "anywhere and everywhere" on the web. The pictures can be taken from your Instagram account, Facebook account, or even your WhatsApp display picture.
Prevention: What to do?
When female victims come across nude deepfakes of themselves, there's a societal need to protect them.
But the solution lies not in the prevention, but in taking immediate actions to remove them.
Amanda Manyame, Digital Law and Rights Advisor at Equality Now, says “I'm seeing that trend, but it's like a natural trend any time something digital happens, where people say don't put images of you online, but if you want to push the idea further is like, don't go out on the street because you can have an accident.” The expert further says, “unfortunately, cybersecurity can't help you much here because it's all a question of dismantling the dissemination network and removing that content altogether.”
Today, the victims of nude deepfakes seek various laws like the General Data Protection Regulation, the European Union's Privacy Law, and national defamation laws to seek justice and prevention.
To the victims who suffer such an offense, it is advisable to take screenshots or video recordings of the deepfake content and use them as proof while reporting it to the police and social media platforms where the incident has happened.
“There is also a platform called StopNCII, or Stop Non-Consensual Abuse of Private Images, where you can report an image of yourself and then the website creates what is called a 'hash' of the content. And then, AI is then used to automatically have the content taken down across multiple platforms," says the Digital Law and Rights at Equality Now.
Global Impact
The new directive aims to combat sexual violence against women, all 27 member states will follow the same set of laws to criminalize all forms of cyber-violence like sexually motivated "deepfakes."
Amanda Manyame says “The problem is that you might have a victim who is in Brussels. You've got the perpetrator who is in California, in the US, and you've got the server, which is holding the content in maybe, let's say, Ireland. So, it becomes a global problem because you are dealing with different countries.”
Addressing this concern, the MEP and co-author of the latest directive explain that “what needs to be done in parallel with the directive" is to increase cooperation with other countries, "because that's the only way we can also combat crime that does not see any boundaries."
"Unfortunately, AI technology is developing very fast, which means that our legislation must also keep up. So we need to revise the directive in this soon. It is an important step for the current state, but we will need to keep up with the development of AI,” Evin Incir further admits.