A non-existent Bloomberg journalist, “Maisy Kinsley”, who had a profile on LinkedIn and Twitter, was probably a deepfake. Deepfake technology can create convincing but entirely fictional photos from scratch.
As Danielle Citron, a professor of law at Boston University, puts it: “Deepfake technology is being weaponised against women.” Beyond the porn there’s plenty of spoof, satire and mischief. As new techniques allow unskilled people to make deepfakes with a handful of photos, fake videos are likely to spread beyond the celebrity world to fuel revenge porn. A staggering 96% were pornographic and 99% of those mapped faces from female celebrities on to porn stars. The AI firm Deeptrace found 15,000 deepfake videos online in September 2019, a near doubling over nine months.
