England and Wales are the first two countries in Europe to begin developing regulations that prohibit the sending without prior consent of pornographic videos made using deep fakes technology.
Deep fakes make it possible to generate highly realistic videos in which the faces of other people are impersonated
Through the use of complex machine learning algorithms in deep fake, a “digital mask” with the features of another person is placed over the face of someone recorded on video in such a way that the gestures and the movement of the mouth when speaking are so convincing that it is difficult to distinguish that it is a montage.
In addition to providing amusing or even compromising and potentially controversial moments, in the case of including political and government representatives whose words and gestures are “faked,” this technology has not been slow to be used to generate pornographic videos where on the body of adult film actors the faces of either famous people or private citizens are superimposed.
The latter behavior has already resulted in the case of England and Wales in more than a dozen complaints from adults who have been threatened with the disclosure of sexually explicit videos of them engaging in explicit behavior on camera.… videos made using deep fake technology. The result is videos that are tremendously convincing but which, in reality, have not been starred by them.
In the case of the regulation being prepared in the two British countries it would not even be necessary to prove on the part of the complainant that the person who has disseminated the content intended to create harm to whoever appears in the video. This would be an approach similar to that of “revenge porn” or “revenge porn”, a behavior consisting of disseminating images initially obtained with the consent of the person starring in them in attitudes unsuitable for viewing by minors and which are subsequently disseminated by the person who received them at a time when their transmission had been limited to “private use”. All this without the knowledge (or consent) of the person who appears in them.
In some cases there are defendants who have been acquitted after proving that they did not intend to cause harm to the women of whom they had intimate images that they disseminated without their consent, but the conduct would be different when the pornographic images have not been obtained at first with the consent of who appears in them but rather from non-explicit photographs the new material has been generated. thanks to deep fake techniques.
In addition to extortion and blackmail, some of the women who have appeared in these videos have suffered profound disorders when they discovered that this type of content was circulating on the Internet, in some cases even attempting suicide.
A legislative committee is addressing this issue with the aim of demanding from the British government the approval of a regulation that regulates these situations, taking up a recommendation that was already made by this committee earlier this year. The aim was to promote legislation that would make it illegal to engage in any behavior related to obtaining or sharing intimate images. without express consent of the person appearing in them.
