A WOMAN has revealed that a close friend of hers made sick fake porn using her face and shared it online.
The victim, who uses the pseudonym Jodie to protect her identity, told the BBC’s File on 4 she discovered the fake images and videos, which were “deepfakes”, after they were sent to her.
2
2
‘Deepfaking’ involves projecting one person’s face onto another person’s body using computer editing software.
This allows you to create very convincing fragments, which you can use to spread disinformation.
In the videos, Jodie’s face was deepfaked onto that of another woman, who was performing sexual acts.
She also discovered that someone had uploaded photos of her to a porn site, asking them to make a deepfake of her.
Read more real life stories
This person had promised to share more photos of Jodie and share her personal information in exchange for the deepfake videos.
Jodie said she was left “screaming and crying” after the incident, which happened in 2021.
For years, she was harassed online by strangers, including Reddit users who ridiculed her appearance and X users who posted photos with explicit captions.
Jodie’s friend Daisy (also a pseudonym) was also seen in some of the photos and the couple compiled a list of men they believed could be responsible.
She assumed she could exclude a few close male friends, but after viewing the deepfakes, she realized she had only shared the image used with one person: Alex Woolf.
Woolf, who won the BBC Young Composer of the Year award in 2012 and went on to star in Mastermind nine years later, had bonded with Jodie over their shared love of music.
She said he always came across as a man who understood the struggles women face online.
Jodie took her findings to the police and Woolf was eventually convicted of spreading highly offensive messages.
Woolf, who graduated from Cambridge, was sentenced to 20 weeks in prison, suspended for two years, at Thames Crown Court in August 2021.
Reflecting on how she felt when her former boyfriend betrayed her, Jodie told the BBC: “He knew so much about the impact it had on my life. And yet he did it anyway.”
What are deepfakes?
Here’s what you need to know…
- Deepfakes use artificial intelligence and machine learning to produce face-swapped videos with minimal effort
- They can be used to create realistic videos where celebrities look like they are saying something they are not.
- Deepfakes are also being used by sick people to create fake porn videos with the faces of celebrities or ex-lovers
- To create the videos, users must first find a XXX clip featuring a pornstar who resembles an actress
- They then feed an app with hundreds – and sometimes thousands – of photos of the victim’s face
- A machine learning algorithm swaps the faces frame by frame until it produces a realistic, yet fake, video
- To help other users create these videos, perverts upload “facesets,” which are large computer folders full of celebrity faces that can easily be fed into the “deepfakes” app.
Woolf denies any involvement in the online harassment that followed the creation of the deepfakes, but told the BBC he was “deeply ashamed” and “deeply sorry” to Jodie for the way his behaviour affected her life.
He said, “Think of the suffering I have caused every day, and have no doubt that I will continue to do so for the rest of my life.
“There are no excuses for what I did, nor can I adequately explain why I acted so despicably on those impulses at the time.”
Jodie wants to make it a criminal offense to ask someone else to make a deepfake for you.
She added: “This affects thousands of women and we need the right laws and tools to stop people from doing this.”
A Reddit spokesperson said: “Non-consensual intimate media (NCIM) has no place on the Reddit platform. The subreddit in question has been banned.”
Fabulous will pay for your exclusive stories. Simply email fabulousdigital@the-sun.co.uk and put EXCLUSIVE in the subject line.
