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Sensei Article Featured In The Virginia State Bar Newsletter

July 2, 2020

“96 Percent of Deepfake Videos Are Women Engaged in Sexual Acts”  by Sensei’s Sharon Nelson and John Simek was featured in the June edition of Virginia State Bar Newsletter Invictus.

Excerpt:

We’ve spent a lot of time worrying about the possible effect of deepfake videos on the 2020 election.

While that’s a real concern, we were blown away by the stats in a report from Deeptrace Labs. The most startling statistic was that 96% of fake videos across the internet are of women, mostly celebrities, whose images are used in sexual fantasy deepfakes without their consent.

A deepfake is a video edited using an algorithm to replace someone on a video with a different person and make it look authentic. The result is a video portraying the person as doing or saying something they did not do. Deeptrace Labs identified 14,678 deepfake videos across a number of streaming platforms and porn sites, a 100 percent increase over its previous measurement of 7,964 videos in December of 2018.

Sadly, we imagine we’ll see a surge in lawyers representing exploited celebrities whose publicity rights have been violated. Far worse, we are quite sure those women (and non-celebrities too) feel physically violated by these images. Revenge porn (targeting ex-girlfriends/wives) has also been taken to a whole new level with the use of deepfake videos.

The top four websites dedicated to hosting deepfakes received a combined 134 million views on such videos. There is, sadly, no absence of demand for these images.

Read the entire article here.