Another intriguing and lucrative use case exploring the potential of deepfake technology: dicks, unblurred. On Monday, police in Japan arrested a man who admitted to sharing porn that was deepfaked to clarify pixellated genitalia. According to The Mainichi, he sold over 2,500 video files for 11 million yen (roughly $96,000). The paper adds that this appears to be the first porn-unblurring-related arrest in the country.
Nakamoto was arrested for breaking copyright law and Japan’s obscenity law, which bans the display of “indecent materials.” Hence you can watch some pretty wild family-themed videos that are technically banned in the US, so long as there’s no genitalia. (A PornMD list shows that phrases including “Japan” are often associated with “hd” and “uncensored” in straight-oriented searches.) Police told The Mainichi that Nakamoto used the deep-learning tool TecoGAN, which clarifies video, and proceeded to upload them to his and other sites.
Japanese police have sought out other deepfake porn artists before, for more commonly known celebrity face-swaps on porn performers, which led to three simultaneous raids and arrests last year and charges of violating defamation and copyright law. Just yesterday, responding to a high-profile celebrity porn face-swap case, Taiwan’s President, Tsai Ing-wen, pledged to generally clamp down on deepfake technology, and specifically when it’s used for disinformation.
Most deepfakes posted online are porn—as of 2019, the threat intelligence startup DeepTrace found that they made up 96 percent of then nearly 15,000 deepfake videos online, a number which had doubled in less than a year. But criminal justice scholars warn of more widespread nefarious abuses like evidence tampering, bullying, terrorist propaganda, and blackmail.
Some are already personally suffering those consequences. In September, the Times of India reported that sextortionists have created a deepfaked puppet women to make video calls enticing victims to perform potentially embarrassing acts on screen. One person told the paper that because he’d done nothing blackmail-worthy, the scammer sent him a deepfaked face-swap video making it appear as if he was “having a sex chat.”
Unbridled use of the technology poses enough of a national security threat that the US federal government has, for two years now, added funding for deepfake counterprograms to the defense budget, including reporting of foreign and election-related deepfakes and a $5 million deepfakes prize for deepfake detection technologies.
