England and Wales are the first two countries in Europe that have begun to develop regulations that prohibit the shipment without the prior consent of pornographic videos made using deep fake 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 fakes, a “digital mask” with the features of another person is placed over the face of someone recorded on video so that the gestures and movement of the mouth when speaking are so convincing that it is difficult to distinguish that it is a person. mounting.
In addition to providing funny or even compromising and potentially controversial moments, in the case of including political and government representatives whose words and gestures are “fake”, this technology has not been long in being used to generate pornographic videos where on the body of movie actors for adults, the faces of either famous people or private citizens are superimposed.
This latter behavior would have already given rise, in the case of England and Wales, to more than a dozen reports of adults being threatened with the disclosure of videos of sexual content in which they appear engaging in explicit behavior in front of the camera… videos made using deep fake technology. The result is videos that are tremendously convincing but that, in reality, have not been carried out by them.
In the case of the regulations that are being prepared in the two British countries, it would not even be necessary for the complainant to prove that the person who disseminated the content intended to create harm to whoever appears in the video. It 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 who stars in them in attitudes that are not suitable for viewing by minors and that are subsequently They are disseminated by the person who received them at a time when their sending had been limited to “private use”. All this without the knowledge (or consent) of who appears in them.
In some cases there are defendants who have been acquitted when it was proven 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 were not initially obtained with the consent of who appears in them but rather The new material has been generated from non-explicit photographs. thanks to deep fake techniques.
In addition to extortion and blackmail, some of the women who have appeared in these videos have suffered profound disturbances upon discovering that this type of content was circulating on the Internet, in some cases even attempting suicide.
A legislative commission is addressing this matter with the aim of demanding from the British government the approval of a regulation that regulates these situations, picking up a recommendation that was already made by said commission at the beginning of this year. It was about promoting legislation that would make all kinds of behavior related to obtaining or sharing intimate images illegal. without the express consent of who appears in them.
