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The most urgent threat of deepfakes isn’t politics

Vox | April 1, 2025



The real threat of deepfakes, explained with Kristen Bell.

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Actress Kristen Bell first found out there were deepfake porn videos of her online from her husband, actor Dax Shepherd. In the videos, her face has been manipulated onto porn stars’ bodies.

“I was just shocked,” the actress told Vox. “It’s hard to think about that I’m being exploited.”

And this isn’t only happening to celebrities. Noelle Martin, a recent law graduate in Perth, Australia, discovered that someone took photos she’d shared on social media and used them first to photoshop her face into nude images, and then to create deepfake videos.

Deepfakes are often portrayed as a political threat — fake videos of politicians making comments they never made. But in a recent report, the research group Deeptrace found that 96% of deepfakes found online are pornographic. Of those videos, virtually all are of women. And virtually all are made without their consent.

Sources:
“The State of Deepfakes” https://deeptracelabs.com/resources/
Defining “Deepfake” https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/22/17380306/deepfake-definition-ai-manipulation-fake-news
“Deepfakes and Cheapfakes: The Manipulation of Audio and Visual Evidence” https://datasociety.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/DS_Deepfakes_Cheap_FakesFinal-1.pdf
“An Introduction to Neural Networks and Autoencoders” https://www.alanzucconi.com/2018/03/14/an-introduction-to-autoencoders/
“Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security” https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3213954

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