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As technology improves over time, the possibilities of what we do or create with it have become endless. The latest keyword that we have seen in the technological space has been ‘AI’ or ‘artificial intelligence’. There has been a lot of good that has come from AI but there’s one particular use of it that especially troubles me and that is deepfake technology. It involves the use of AI to manipulate or create realistic fakes of various types of media, including audio, video, and images. In the beginning, deepfakes were still easily discernable to the eye but as the technology improved, the content made using it started to look more and more realistic to the point that it can be hard to distinguish it from the real thing. As a woman, my main worry about deepfakes is how they can be used to create revenge porn, which is a form of sexual exploitation that has become a bigger issue due to the misuse of AI.

When deepfakes first started circling around the internet, most of the content was light and amusing. Imagine a rapper like Drake singing a cute KPOP song or important world figures like Obama saying the most ridiculous and unserious thing. Many people at the time viewed deepfakes primarily as memes circulating on the Internet. Personally, I realized how deepfakes can be used for harmful purposes when deepfake porn of female celebrities started going around. At the time, I came across comments from people who didn’t see anything particularly wrong with it, adopting a rather blasé attitude to it. “They’re public figures, fake porn made with their images is to be expected, it’s not a big deal” was the sentiment that I saw. But it unlocked a fear in me because if this can be done to public figures, when will it be done to ordinary women like me?

And my prediction has come true. After some time, more and more news started to come out about sexually explicit deepfakes being distributed without consent. The latest case that made it to global news that I can recall would be the one that happened in Australia where a teenage boy created and distributed deepfake pornographic images of around 50 schoolgirls. The idea that a mere child could do something so heinous is deeply uncomfortable and made me wonder how they couldn’t see how wrong it was before doing it. In South Korea, there has also been a rise in deepfake porn cases where female students are being targeted and having their images shared on Telegram chatrooms to be converted into fake pornographic images. An even larger concern is the fact that many of the victims are underaged. The most troubling thing to me is how these crimes are becoming more and more elaborate. It’s one thing if the crime was just the work of a single person, but the idea that you can have so many people band together to commit such a crime is terrifying to me. Not only that but often times these people are doing it to people around them such as friends, family members, colleagues etc.

The most frustrating thing is that initially, it felt as though a lot of these crimes were not taken seriously. You had some police officers telling victims that not much could be done as there were no laws against it or that it would be hard to catch the perpetrator and to just let it go. Many women and young girls are living in fear that they could be the next victim, including me. I myself have personally seen the Telegram chat groups that are notorious for such crimes. It made me extremely uncomfortable to see random people (mostly men) send photos of women and sexualizing them, even going so far as to share personal details of these women. The idea that someone could take an innocent photo of me and use it for such a heinous purpose scared me to the point where I made sure to private my social media accounts and not post photos that had a clear view of my face. I also made sure that my social media accounts did not have any particular personal details that would allow people to identify me. 

That being said, the one event that happened that really opened my eyes to the dangers of deepfakes was when one of my close female friends became a victim. What happened was that a man that she had spurned was so mad that he took some random photos off her Instagram and proceeded to create deepfake porn out of it. He then circulated it among the people on her followers list which consisted of friends, family and colleagues. The amount of mental trauma that put her through still sticks with me today. She became a shell of herself as she tried to inform everyone that the person in the pictures wasn’t her and that they were fake. But because the technology was so advanced and the pictures looked so real, there were definitely people who were not convinced. The worst thing was that the authorities did not do anything because there are no specific laws currently against deepfakes in my country (Malaysia). 

Ultimately, I can only see this issue with deepfakes getting worse over time though honestly, it’s already quite severe. The only hope I can see is that more and more countries are creating laws to curb the threat of deepfakes. I also hope that people will become more educated about how to spot a deepfake and at least understand the threat it poses to women and be more sympathetic when such crimes do occur.