An investigation into a bot service that produces fake nude photos online has revealed that the most pressing danger internet "deepfakes" present isn't bogus news but the distribution of sexually explicit images or videos of people without their knowledge.
A bot on popular messaging app Telegram can virtually take women's clothes off to generate over a hundred thousand deepfake nude photos, according to a new report.
Real Women
Deepfakes - a portmanteau of "deep learning" and "fake" - is a "synthetic media" in which an individual in an image or video is altered or replaced with someone else's likeness. Based on reports, the women are real - and the photos have been taken from their social media profiles.
Deep fake-monitoring firm Sensity disclosed it had discovered a vast operation propagating artificial intelligence-produced nude images of women. In some cases, the victims are minors, and most of them are girls.
On The Rise
Sensity is an intelligence group that monitors and exposes deepfakes and other types of ill-intentioned visual media. As of July this year, the company said the bots have produced deepfakes of around 104,000 women and this figure has doubled in the last three months.
The Telegram channels Sensity (formerly Deeptrace) said it has analyzed were comprised of around 101,080 members from around the globe, with 70% being traced back from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and other nations from Eastern Europe.
According to Wikipedia, synthetic media is a catch-all term for the manipulation, production, and alteration of data and media by automated means, especially through the use of AI algorithms.
Revenge Porn
The spread of disinformation with the intent of destroying other people's reputation on the internet has been around for years even before automated systems were developed. All the bad guys needed was a photo enhancing software and voila - revenge porn.
Giorgio Patrini, Sensity chief executive officer, said the switch to using images of private individuals is quite new. "Having a social media account with public photos is just enough for any person to become a target," he warned.
The bot responsible for the spread of malicious images is free to use on computers and smartphones and can be easily accessed through Telegram that promises secure messaging. Telegram, an instant messaging app developed in 2013, is banned in Russia, China and Iran.
