I don’t remember the exact words my friend used. But I can recall the gist of it and his obvious discomfort. What he told me was stranger than I could ever have imagined. He said that he had encountered images of me on a porn site: manipulated, faked images, my face on other bodies, galleries of pictures uploaded by someone who claimed to be my boyfriend. I didn’t know how to react. I had my arms very close to my sides and I was gripping the edge of the sofa. I was utterly confused – I’d never shared any intimate photo of myself with anyone. How had I ended up in DIY porn?
I remember thinking that my male acquaintance was using the language of subtlety and complexity while I was a stuck record, shouting the same things on loop: That’s impossible. Then: What have I done to deserve it?
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Quite a compelling story. Unfortunately this kind of abuse is likely to only grow and continue, especially as law is slow to catch up.
A month or two ago (sounds right?) This happened at a school in Spain. A high school (underage!) girl had her head integrated into AI generated porn by her peers. The AI evangelists still were defensive and calling those of us Luddites saying “it’s unavoidable and we have to learn to live with it.” Utterly bizarre take and disgusting.
Yeah I remember that story. Some people have no empathy or emotional intelligence 😩
I was worried that my parents and older relatives would think I must have shared explicit photos of myself, that they wouldn’t be familiar with the idea of digital manipulation. But I was also angry about the culture that underlies such responses, a climate that focuses on what victims can do to safeguard themselves from violation, rather than how we might stop people violating others. Even if I had been sending nudes, it wouldn’t have given someone else the right to share them with the world.
Yeah. A culture of victim-blaming and the reflexive thoughts of “what could I have done differently to prevent things from happening” (even if none of what happened was your doing) make it difficult to get the initial word out and tell people what happened to you and get help and support.
I pretend that “Weird Al” Yankovic did it first in 2011 but since generative AI and image editing have taken off in recent years the less funny and way more disturbing kind of image manipulations of real people will only continue to increase.
The idea of people broadcasting their faces almost every day on social media has always seemed absurd to me. I keep a limited public presence, though you could likely find out some things if you sleuthed hard enough.
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“Deepfake” porn – where an image is digitally manipulated to replace one person’s likeness with that of another – is sometimes used in a malicious attempt to humiliate female celebrities, figures in the public eye.
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I’d also just finished reading Laura Bates’s book Men Who Hate Women and her examination of “incel” culture and online misogyny.
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You wouldn’t need to be an expert in coding to have produced some of these – there were various levels of sophistication on show, and I now know that there are apps that make faked images and videos at the click of a button.
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It was obvious that someone had downloaded ordinary images (mostly holiday photos or selfies from social media such as Facebook, but some could have simply been accessed through a search engine) and used those to create the new pictures.
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My partner was always there to listen, but I was aware of the need to protect my stepdaughter from some of my turmoil, especially as – like many teenagers – she was having a difficult time dealing with the disruption to her normal life caused by Covid.
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I don’t want to live my life looking at everyone and wondering, “Was it you?” I am fairly trusting by nature and sometimes that backfires, but being open to the world also creates opportunities for intense joy.
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