Demand for deepfake pornography is exploding. We aren’t ready | Moira Donegan

With cheap apps proliferating, how long til our likeness appears in a nonconsensual deepfake porn video?

In the ad, a woman in a white lace dress makes suggestive faces at the camera, and then kneels. There's something a bit uncanny about her; a quiver at the side of her temple, a peculiar stillness of her lip. But if you saw the video in the wild, you might not know that it's a deepfake fabrication. It would just look like a video, like the opening shots of some cheesy, low-budget internet porn.

In top right corner, as the video loops, there is a still image of the actress Emma Watson, taken when she was a teenager, from a promotional shoot for the Harry Potter movies. It's her face that has been pasted on to the porn performer's. Suddenly, a woman who has never performed in pornography is featured in it.