You may have heard them discussed in relation to the doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that went viral in May, or the fake video of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that made the rounds this month. Note that the app only worked on women (if you tried to use it on a photo of a man, it just added female genitalia to him) - which right away should make you dubious about the programmer’s original intentions.ĭeepfakes are most often discussed as a threat in the political realm, because of their potential to sow misinformation and fake news. There was no way to use it other than for that very sort of “misuse.” How could the world ever be ready for an app whose sole and explicit purpose is to transform regular photos of women into nudes within seconds? Or, put another way, of course people were going to “misuse” the app.

(For ethical reasons, I’m not going to include examples of the photos in this article.)Īlthough the programmer’s decision to pull his product is welcome, he capped off the announcement with a conclusion that seems naive at best and disingenuous at worst: “The world is not yet ready for DeepNude.” You don’t need a whole lot of imagination to realize how it could be used to produce revenge porn that will be all the more devastating to the target’s life because of how realistic some of the nude photos look. In other words, it had all the ingredients necessary to turn an unsuspecting woman’s existence into a living hell. The short-lived app was free, easy to use, and fast - the digital disrobing only took 30 seconds. 8uJKBQTZ0o- deepnudeapp June 27, 2019ĭamn straight. In an excellent example of how public scrutiny can bring unethical AI-powered tech to a halt, the developer then said he realized that “the probability that people will misuse it is too high.” So it was really great news when, just days after he released the app, the programmer behind it decided to shut it down on Thursday.Īfter Motherboard first reported on the “horrifying” new app, other news outlets followed suit with critical coverage. Even if you’ve never posed naked for a photo in your life, anyone who downloads DeepNude can make it look as if you did. This app is the latest evolution of AI-powered deepfake technology, which makes it disturbingly easy to doctor images to make it look like someone said or did something they never actually said or did. The result is pretty realistic - and blatantly unethical. If you feed it a picture of a clothed woman, it removes her clothes so that she appears naked. An anonymous programmer created a new app called DeepNude that uses AI to create nonconsensual porn.

Deepfake app nude