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posted by janrinok on Thursday February 08 2018, @02:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the porn-with-morals dept.

The AI porn purge continues:

Pornhub will be deleting "deepfakes" — AI-generated videos that realistically edit new faces onto pornographic actors — under its rules against nonconsensual porn, following in the footsteps of platforms like Discord and Gfycat. "We do not tolerate any nonconsensual content on the site and we remove all said content as soon as we are made aware of it," the company told Motherboard, which first reported on the deepfakes porn phenomenon last year. Pornhub says that nonconsensual content includes "revenge porn, deepfakes, or anything published without a person's consent or permission."

Update: The infamous subreddit itself, /r/deepfakes, has been banned by Reddit. /r/CelebFakes and /r/CelebrityFakes have also been banned for their non-AI porn fakery (they had existed for over 7 years). Other subreddits like /r/fakeapp (technical support for the software) and /r/SFWdeepfakes remain intact. Reported at Motherboard, The Verge, and TechCrunch.

Motherboard also reported on some users (primarily on a new subreddit, /r/deepfakeservice) offering to accept commissions to create deepfakes porn. This is seen as more likely to result in a lawsuit:

Bringing commercial use into the deepfakes practice opens the creator up to a lawsuit on the basis of right of publicity laws, which describe the right of an individual to control the commercial use of their name, likeness, or any other unequivocal aspect of their identity, legal experts told me.

"The videos are probably wrongful under the law whether or not money is exchanged," Charles Duan, associate director of tech and innovation policy at the advocacy group R Street Institute think tank, told me. "But what's important is that the commercial exchange creates a focal point for tracing and hopefully stopping this activity. It might be easy to be anonymous on the internet, but it's a lot harder when you want to be paid."

[...] David Greene, Civil Liberties Director at the Electronic Freedom Foundation, told me on the phone that buying and selling, like everything with deepfakes, may be clearly unsavory behavior, but not necessarily illegal. "I want to separate something that's probably a dumb legal idea from something that's just a socially bad thing to do," Greene said. "If you're doing it to harass somebody, it's certainly a bad idea legally and socially."

Update: However, /r/deepfakeservice has also been hit with the banhammer. Looks like "deepfakes" will soon become "darkwebfakes".

Previously: AI-Generated Fake Celebrity Porn Craze "Blowing Up" on Reddit
Discord Takes Down "Deepfakes" Channel, Citing Policy Against "Revenge Porn"

Related: Linux Use on Pornhub Surged 14% in 2016
Pornhub's Newest Videos Can Reach Out and Touch You
Pornhub Adopts Machine Learning to Tag Videos as Malvertising Looms
Pornhub's First Store has a Livestreaming Bed Camera, of Course


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 08 2018, @04:46AM (17 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 08 2018, @04:46AM (#634675)

    Assume its wrong to create or distribute an 'image of a person' without their consent.

    What if an RNG spits out an image file which happens to look like a photo of a person; is it an image of them?
    What if a photo is taken of a person; it is an image of them?
    Given the image is the same in both cases, if your answers to the above differ then you do not believe that images can intrinsically be of people.

    One must therefore believe either a) both are images of the lookalike; b) neither are images of the lookalike; or c) images can't intrinsically be of people.
    A is absurd due to it making running an RNG morally wrong without first blacklisting numbers corresponding to images which look sufficiently like anyone for whom one lacks consent to creates images thereof.
    B is absurd given it claims a photographic portrait isn't an image of the subject.
    C will therefore be the only option further considered.

    Both images are uploaded, and since they are identical only one copy is stored and two softlinks to it: /rng and /photo.
    By our assumption it is moral to host /photo, and immoral to host /rng. So far, so good.
    Is it moral to host the underlying raw sectors which both links point to? Does the answer depend on the nature of the deduplication scheme rather than the content of those sectors?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 08 2018, @04:57AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 08 2018, @04:57AM (#634679)

    "By our assumption it is moral to..." mixed up /photo and /rng, it ought state hosting /rng is moral and /photo isn't.

    I also failed to account for the case where one considers the RNG output an image of the person, but not the photo of them.

    It's 5am though, and I don't really care since there's no putting this cat back in the bag.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 08 2018, @05:25AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 08 2018, @05:25AM (#634694)

    Unfortunately for your argument, the law and ethics care about providence (where the data came from). Copying something is treated differently by the law than creating something that happens to be identical to that copy.

    • (Score: 2) by MostCynical on Thursday February 08 2018, @07:22AM (3 children)

      by MostCynical (2589) on Thursday February 08 2018, @07:22AM (#634766) Journal

      Star Trek replicators and transporter beams are unethical and illegal under US copyright.
      They only produce copies!

      (Also, you murdered the original person, so you broke another law)

      One extreme: The US puritanicalism, at the other: France and Italy (the powerful politician *doesn't* have a mistress? What is wrong with him?!)

      --
      "I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
      • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 08 2018, @07:27AM (2 children)

        by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday February 08 2018, @07:27AM (#634770) Journal

        Star Trek replicators and transporter beams are unethical and illegal under US copyright.
        They only produce copies!

        Star Trek replicators can reproduce stuff that is not under copyright, and in that case won't violate copyright. Of course they could also be used to violate copyright.

        --
        The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 08 2018, @07:47AM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 08 2018, @07:47AM (#634775)

          Star Trek replicators can reproduce stuff that is not under copyright, and in that case won't violate copyright. Of course they could also be used to violate copyright.

          You know, like the printing press. Or a modern printer.

          • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 08 2018, @08:03AM

            by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday February 08 2018, @08:03AM (#634778) Journal

            Which both are not illegal under US copyright. Thank you for supporting my point.

            --
            The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 08 2018, @04:43PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 08 2018, @04:43PM (#634999)

      Is it moral to host the underlying raw sectors which both links point to? Does the answer depend on the nature of the deduplication scheme rather than the content of those sectors?

      The implication being it's absurd to consider the source of data as significant.

  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 08 2018, @07:24AM (2 children)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday February 08 2018, @07:24AM (#634768) Journal

    What if an RNG spits out an image file which happens to look like a photo of a person; is it an image of them?

    Unless the RNG was specifically biased using that face, no it isn't. However it is extremely unlikely that this happens, and therefore you'll have a hard time arguing that way. Unless you can give convincing evidence that an image of that person, or your knowledge about that person's image, did not enter the creation.

    What if a photo is taken of a person; it is an image of them?

    Yes, of course.

    How the thing came into being indeed does matter. It's just like in copyright: If you write something and it happens by chance to match something that someone else wrote, then you are not violating that other person's copyright. However you better have convincing evidence of that. Clean room implementations are exactly about documenting that the implementer did not have access to the copyrighted stuff.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 08 2018, @04:46PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 08 2018, @04:46PM (#635002)

      Is it moral to host the underlying raw sectors which both links point to? Does the answer depend on the nature of the deduplication scheme rather than the content of those sectors?

    • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday February 08 2018, @06:30PM

      by tangomargarine (667) on Thursday February 08 2018, @06:30PM (#635096)

      Unless the RNG was specifically biased using that face, no it isn't. However it is extremely unlikely that this happens, and therefore you'll have a hard time arguing that way. Unless you can give convincing evidence that an image of that person, or your knowledge about that person's image, did not enter the creation.

      You could seed/bias/whatever the RNG by giving it a bunch of pictures of people who *did* consent to it, which would make it much more likely to spit out similar human-shaped images.

      --
      "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
  • (Score: 2) by Non Sequor on Thursday February 08 2018, @02:43PM (1 child)

    by Non Sequor (1005) on Thursday February 08 2018, @02:43PM (#634931) Journal

    Algorithmic information theory says that even though the probability of any specific string is the same as any other the probability of generating a recognizable picture with an RNG is negligible and the probability of unrecognizable noise is almost certain. At reasonable resolutions, negligible is going to mean it’s completely impractical to generate an image using a uniform distribution. You could generate one using a reference data set to essentially generate a prior distribution of images more specific than the uniform distribution. That’s essentially what a deep fake is.

    --
    Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 08 2018, @04:49PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 08 2018, @04:49PM (#635007)

      Sorry, your comment relies on considering what happens if people generate and save large volumes of random bits and attempt to interpret them as images. Given this isn't going to realistically happen I consider any argument based on it unworthy of consideration.

      /sarcasm

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 08 2018, @04:29PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 08 2018, @04:29PM (#634989)

    All possible child porn exists in the RNG.

  • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday February 08 2018, @06:18PM (1 child)

    by DeathMonkey (1380) on Thursday February 08 2018, @06:18PM (#635084) Journal

    What if an RNG spits out an image file which happens to look like a photo of a person; is it an image of them?

    The Justice system contends itself with what did happen, not what might happen.

    So, I'd suggest you setup your RNG. Wait a million years. Then, enjoy your day in court!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 09 2018, @03:50PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 09 2018, @03:50PM (#635532)

      I'm talking about what the law ought be, not what it is.

      The legislature exclusively concerns itself with what might happen and not at all (in a sane country) with what did happen.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 08 2018, @09:20PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 08 2018, @09:20PM (#635209)

    Now we are heading into colour of bits grade thinking.

    http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 [sooke.bc.ca]

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @07:20AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @07:20AM (#635917)

      That was a really interesting link.