Late last year, a redditor called Deepfakes gained notoriety for the
extremely convincing face-swap porn videos he was making, in which the
faces of mainstream Hollywood actors and rockstars were convincingly
overlaid on the bodies of performers in pornography.
Deepfakes created his own subreddit dedicated to the practice and one of the habitues there created Fakeapp, an app that makes it significantly easier to create your own deepfakes.
Now, /r/deepfakes is filling up with convincing pornographic faceswaps
of celebrities, and when they escape the confines of the subreddit, they
get posted to tabloid sites as “genuine” sex-tapes.
The tool, meanwhile, is undergoing rapid development, making strides in
usability and polish of its output, heralding a day, very soon, when we
will see a lot of these fakes and struggle immensely to
distinguish them from reality. They needn’t be pornographic, of course
– you could faceswap Gandhi onto the aggressor in a beat-down, or Mike
Pence onto Pride leather parade-float dancer.
