“This is something that targets everyday people, everyday high school students, everyday adults-it's become a daily occurrence,” says Sophie Maddocks, who conducts research on digital rights and cyber-sexual violence at the University of Pennsylvania. There are likely millions of images being created with these apps.
Face-swapping apps that work on still images and apps where clothes can be “stripped off a person” in a photo with just a few clicks are also highly prominent. A whole industry of deepfake abuse, which predominantly targets women and is produced without people’s consent or knowledge, has emerged in recent years.
These startling figures are just a snapshot of how colossal the issues with nonconsensual deepfakes has become-the full scale of the problem is much larger and encompasses other types of manipulated imagery.
