WARNING: Sensitive material. Content involves artificial intelligence weaponized against women.

The Washington Post reports a new disturbing use of artificial intelligence–in a free app, no less–that enables users to past the image of anyone onto the face of someone else depicted in a video. The menu of “deepfake” unethical issues are myriad but increasingly target women.

According to a Dec. 30, 2018 article by Drew Harwell,   

Supercharged by powerful and widely available artificial-intelligence software developed by Google, these lifelike “deepfake” videos have quickly multiplied across the Internet, blurring the line between truth and lie. But the videos have also been weaponized disproportionately against women, representing a new and degrading means of humiliation, harassment and abuse.

The Post reports that actress Scarlett Johansson’s face has been superimposed into dozens of graphic sex scenes now available on Internet. There is also a growing concern that the technology can use images from social media like Facebook and superimpose them on similar explicit videos as a new type of AI revenge porn.

The fakes “are explicitly detailed, posted on popular porn sites and increasingly challenging to detect.” Worse, the Post article states that victims may have little recourse as the legality of the technology has yet to be challenged and may even be protected by the First Amendment unless associated with existing laws on defamation, identity theft or fraud.

An anonymous online community of creators is instructing others on how to create deepfake videos, a dangerous new weapon in the troll arsenal.

Interpersonal Divide in the Age of the Machine covers similar abuses of AI in several chapters, prophesying these new technologies will erode our perception of the world so that we no longer can discern what is real or fake. That impacts how we interact with others and the manner in which we experience the world.

The thesis of the book documents how “moral code is corrupted by machine code.”

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