An interesting video essay

In somewhat of a departure from this blog's usual content... 

I came across this video essay, which is 30 minutes long. I didn't feel like watching it so I used a website that generates a transcript of Youtube videos to read what was said in it. It's about deepfakes and their use in pornography and why that's bad for society. It was rather interesting. 

The transcript is quite long, but I guess that's what happens when it's from a 30 minute video. Here is the transcript for both my and your (theoretical reader) future reference. It was made via Youtube's autocaption feature, so there are probably some errors here and there where it couldn't really make an accurate caption/transcription. So I tried to format and clean up the transcript a bit. In some places I assumed a word or two that would make sense if the autocaptioned words didn't. 

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hey everyone, I'm back with another podcast on the subject of deep fakes. for those of you who don't know what a deep fake is, it is a tool that stems from advances in artificial intelligence where a system can learn to create very real looking fake image video audio. many of you might have heard about this. it's been in the news recently so with the arrival of chat gpt we're discussing artificial intelligence more in general and this is one of the things that's in the Pandora's box.

deep fakes have me incredibly concerned. I've been speaking about this for some years but it's just getting more and more common more and more real. this technology permits anyone to take anybody's face or voice and create any kind of audio/video of them including pornographic. so in practice visual deep fakes are currently mostly used to create porn of celebrities of female politicians and increasingly of so-called civilian women.

so that's any woman or girl the Corpus [??? may be a transcription error]. so the training data for a deep fake it's getting less and less. so this technology is getting better and better, that it can do fairly realistic renderings of a woman's face put onto the body of a woman in porn, even based on very little visual material.

so your Instagram account, for example, could totally be enough if there's a few pictures of you on there. there are already cases where just a random woman's social media accounts were taken. so that can be a stranger, a stranger can just decide that he doesn't just want to imagine having sex with you in his head, he'd like to see it. 

and if he has access to this technology, it's becoming more accessible, he can create that so he'll take your social media, put your face [and] run it through a program and then he'll have porn of, you know whatever preference he has. 

not that I think if he just rendered a very tasteful lingerie picture that'd be harmless, I think all of this is violating. but of course the kind of men who do this will put you into hardcore porn let's be real they're gonna put you into you know, videos of women being suffocated, deep throat, gangbangs Etc. 

they're gonna put you into the most vile [ shit -- Youtube's automatic captions omit profanity] that you can imagine. again they can do this to anybody. they will do this to underage girls, they're not gonna wait till she's 18. I mean come on let's be real

so there's two angles to this. there's the perpetrators and there's the victim. so from the perpetrator angle that could be a stranger who just finds you online. could of course be somebody you know. let's say it's an ex-boyfriend who's got material [of you] and he doesn't need nude material, he just needs your face, preferably from various angles but again they need less and less to make it look real.

so this ex-boyfriend could take your pictures and do this and then post it online. so that's the other step. if it's for his personal enjoyment first personal hate wank that's one thing but they're going to be putting that online and that could end up anywhere so his friends could see that. 

I mean men already, frightening number of men and boys share women's nude images already. or look at you know celebrity revenge porn already, where like they know the woman didn't give permission that's already incredibly normal. but now a man can make realistic looking porn of you, share it to his friends, put it on PornHub, put it on any porn site. 

so so from the consumer side like like I said, could be a stranger, could be somebody close to her -- that's relevant from the legislative point. so this is not illegal in many countries and jurisdictions. I think it's illegal, I read recently, in four American states.

so victims do not have recourse and I mean most victims uh probably won't take it to court anyway. I mean we know victims of regular revenge porn and rape and intimate partner violence Etc do not report. because reporting is traumatic, because then other people will have to look at the material. so various authorities are going to have to look at that material.

so even if it was illegal most men will still get away with it. and then extra [complication?] trying to catch somebody. if it's some stranger online, it could be in a totally different country. not a chance, nothing's going to happen to him.

if it's distributed by platforms like PornHub, I think deep fake pornography is going to be added to the list of crimes of PornHub. and of course PornHub is just to stand in for the porn industry in general. I mean, the porn industry has no ethics so there's no legal recourse so what would the alternative be? well social shame, but of course the reality is again she'd have to prove it's not her.

and very depressingly I tweeted about this today. and a woman replied "I have very recognizable tattoos so if anyone put my my image into a porn video I could prove it's not me because those tattoos are not going to be there." I mean, that, too, is I think only going to last so long. if someone really wanted to, they probably could recreate your tattoos as well. 

but the problem is that even if she has the conviction of knowing it's not real, um are most people gonna believe her? like is she gonna have to undress and show a tattoo she has in some intimate place? or like victims are supposed to go around and tell everyone it's not real and prove it to them? 

this reminds me of a Revenge, well actually, so-called child pornography. I know that many victims don't like the term so I know that many prefer to call it child sexual abuse material, which it is objectively. 

so a case of that happened in my class. so I don't even know what really happened it doesn't matter. and my understanding is like a 15 year old girl send a 15 year old boy nude images of herself. he shared it with the entire class. to defend herself, she said they were photoshopped. maybe they were actually photoshopped, I don't know, it doesn't matter. like what he did is a crime. you know what happened?

the class blamed her. like if she hadn't said they were fake, they would have blamed her for sharing them. because she did say they were fake, they said she's a liar those are real, and her lying is as bad as him sharing it. that was the attitude among the kids.

so this is so traumatizing for that girl. I didn't really get it back then. I didn't see those images, I just heard the way people talked about her. the victim blaming was off the charts. and adults intervened. adults caught wind of it because the entire class was talking about it. 

and um the distribution of child pornography is [illegal??] in Germany, so I think there was some police involvement. I don't know, I don't think there were any consequences because the perp was a minor too. but anyway. um the social consequence. so what should have happened was that boy should have been thrown out of school. like there should have been serious consequences for him. that didn't happen of course, right 

if you can't use the legal arm you have to use social shaming. of course, the vast majority of the shaming ended up on the girl. and then actually the teachers asked both the boy and the girl to apologize to us. and the victims in this case were [half??] the class who had been shown this image or who had been caught up in the disturbing gossip.

we did not have, not that I think it would have made a huge difference, we didn't even have like a consent lesson or something, which would have been preferable. I don't idealize those kind of trainings. I'm not sure how much they do, but that would have been more appropriate than what happened. 

they both had to get up in front of class and apologize. that's anecdotal but let's be real, like social shaming is not going to happen. most people are not going to believe her, they're not going to be sure [who?] to believe. [they] are going to be caught up in "is it real, is it not real." it doesn't matter. the man who distributed it, whether it's real or not, he's the scumbag.

like way back when, that would have been the kind of guy that... he's the one who should have been in town square with people like throwing rotting Tomatoes at him. all right, tomatoes didn't exist in medieval times because they came from America. I know you guys know what I mean. so there's not going to be punishment from the government. there's not got to be social punishment, so what's gonna happen?

so here are my predictions for what's going to happen. so mental health, of especially teenage girls, has been declining for a long time. I mean, this is like America-centric data but I don't think it's Unique to the US. we know social media like Instagram just gives them like body dysmorphia and dysphoria. now add to that, that they could find graphic nude videos of themselves online.

and now already or in the foreseeable future, that mental health decline is going to get worse. there's going to be an increase of girls who like don't know what the hell they could do. best case, they just move schools or move Town, although of course the online thing can follow you.

a lot are going to commit suicide there. I have read studies about women in South Korea who were filmed against their will in like bathrooms and changing rooms or their private homes by these so-called spy cameras, which is the next pandemic among us. 

there's a whole a big business of these tiny tiny cameras that look like heads of nails that can be put anywhere, including you know, public bathrooms and stuff and changing rooms. and some [ expletive ] in your friend's Circle has access to that. he can put that in your bedroom. 

so women in South Korea live with that, and they live with a paranoia of potentially being filmed nude anywhere. and the interviews with those victims show that women become incredibly depressed. they're terrified of their Future boss think that's stuff about you while he's browsing the porn sites.

there's apparently enough demand that a creator of that kind of porn, he hosts the live streaming site. and these tiny cameras can live stream. there are enough -- I'll just call them digital rapists. this is like a digital gang rape -- digital gang rapists watching that stuff for a pornographer of that kind to make a good money.

um and the women who live through this, it has terrible effects on their mental health. they don't feel safe anywhere. obviously, I mean how paranoid would you be if anything could be a [ fucking ] camera and your life could be someone else's porn? and this is when I want to make a whole video about that. that's what South Korean women were shouting in the biggest women-only protests that country's ever seen. "my life is not your porn"

as super detrimental effects, it's going to increase the disrespect and the rates of assault against women. so there are enough men out there who think, "well okay, so that girl has an only fans, that girl has this and that. I saw that nude images, whatever of her." they don't care how it was made. they don't care if she chose to do it or not. 

this is why please please please please please please stop shaming women who say they choose to put that stuff online. first of all you're like you don't know could be a coping mechanism. if it's not, doesn't matter. these consequences haunt all of them. these boys and men don't care how it came online. they're going to shame those women, they're gonna bully them, they're going to take it as an excuse to assault them. because "well I saw her online doing this and that. she's a [ expletive ] nympho, she wants that any time"

that stuff is going to increase. like these are all already problems with like regular porn. like let's be clear, it's been possible for a long time for like past 20, 30 years for them to go online or to a video store way back when and get a video off of. let's say they have a hate boner for their colleague and she has like red hair and glasses. well he types into PornHub "red hair glasses office porn" and could then watch a woman with some similarity to his colleague get raped.

this has already been possible for a long time .this is just the more extreme version. like now he can take her face, and it does not take a huge number of perpetrators for this to become a mass phenomena. same as most men don't rape, although many men have been in a gray area situations. 

let's be real. the thing here is you can have a very small number of men like hosting these like spy cam live streaming sites or creating this deep fake porn but they will disseminate it to hundreds thousands tens of thousands millions. right this is like why we should punish like the consumption of child sexual abuse material really really harshly. but of course in reality, most get away with it or get a slap on the wrist because if you didn't produce it, if you didn't personally lay a finger on the woman or child, then do as you wish.

so every man and a frightening number of women, I think a third of women are porn consumers too. and like let's be clear, like my generation didn't make some kind of conscious decision as an educated adult to see whether they wanted to consume porn. it was just suggested to us as normal. we were flooded with it online. a lot of us got addicted. including the girls, including the girls, so I don't blame every porn consumer saying "wow you're just a misogynist."

I understand that it is more complex, but if you start getting into worse and worse stuff, and like your empathy [should] kick [in] at some point. and I know it does. I know some men and boys and some women who said like "I did see some [ fucked ] up stuff and I felt bad about that, and I didn't want to see that anymore." so I know not every porn consumer is totally dead in their heart or anything. 

like I'm not trying to dehumanize that entire group. I know that group includes a lot of children. I know this stuff is more complex but I still want to say you're not off the hook as a consumer. like I said, this deep fake porn stuff, the spy cam porn stuff is going to end up -- it does, it's not going to, it currently does end up on regular porn sites.

we know the internet never forgets. so when you go online and you watch any porn, like first of all, even if that's a firm, a company with a reputation, and you have these consent videos, you realize that trafficked women and traumatized women and drugged women -- they all have to shoot consent videos too. so like that's one thing, but most people are not going to even bother to look up the company that produced it. 

not that that would fix it or make it ethical but most people don't even do that. so most people just go online type in something that's to their liking. or they they passively, slowly develop a preference for something without even really realizing it thinking about it consciously.

if you consume porn regularly, you probably have already masturbated to somebody who is being raped, somebody who maybe wasn't an adult, somebody who was trafficked, somebody drugged, somebody who would have literally gone hungry or homeless if they didn't, somebody coerced by their boyfriend right. if you're watching like this stuff with like couples, you know that pimps do that to women under the lover boy method. pretend that's the relationship and then pimp woman out in front of the camera. 

ever since porn has existed, there have been whistleblowers telling us that their rape was watched by millions and a lot of those Millions didn't realize. for some it was the direct appeal, but a lot didn't realize. so that's already the reality. now add to that an increasing number, increases by an incredible amount every year, of deep fake porn. if you keep watching porn, you are, even if you're don't intend to be, part of the demand.

and that porn could come if your female, could come for you. if you have any women in your life that you care about even remotely, it could come for them. or if you just care about women in general because you're a decent human being. I think there are plenty of porn consumers who, if they thought about it, it wouldn't square with their values, not really. so if you care about any woman or girl at all, you have to quit porn. it's the only way to stop this.

I would give other practical advice if I could, but this is the most effective thing you can do: not watch any porn. use your imagination like your forefathers and foremothers have done for a very long time. the most effective thing that you can do is not watch porn and encourage your friends to not watch it either. build a new sexual culture. you know you've got a cinema in your head, you can imagine someone in your head who likes the things that you like, who wants to do them with you, who matches your preferences visually, whatever. like you have it in your head, you've got an erotica studio in your head.

is it as overtly stimulating as porn? no. I know like that porn really hits you know the dopamine and all that stuff, but it works just fine but there are a lot of people including some men who do not watch porn and they do fine it's not like anyone's asking you to stop masturbating. like the idea that anti-porn is anti-masturbation, is ridiculous. I mean, on my list of things that I'm concerned about with porn like men not being able to get it up is sort of last one but we got plenty of reports of men and boys reporting that porn makes their dicks not work.

main point is, if you want to stop the proliferation of deep fake porn, it's not enough to avoid sites that tell you "hey this is a deep fake." they will look so real that you can't tell. so if you want to stop them, you need to not consume it. you need to, we need to stop normalizing porn consumption.

it's not about shame or you can't be sexual. it's about when you're sexual, it's really important that the people involved in that, including if there's a screen between you and it's a video that was recorded, but way back, when the people who are involved in that want to be.

when it comes to prevention from the victim's side, you will probably be slightly safer if you have fewer photos online. none of this means that I blame women who've got tons of photos online, or like Hollywood actresses. of course not. and I don't want the digital world to look like -- I don't want women and girls to have to all like wear masks, or like I call them, like digital burqas.

like I know lots of women who are online anonymously because they're worried about consequences like just for being feminist activists. but there are consequences being online just for being female, so and I don't want the result to be like burkas on all women and girls. but unfortunately if you're really really scared of this happening, you can decrease the chances slightly by putting less material online, or like altering your appearance. 

like you're probably gonna see me slap on lots of makeup so that if this is ever done to me, the face that they're going to use is not going to be the one that I see in the morning when I look in the mirror. like I already do that, like I change my appearance. the reality is that like if you have to take a picture and put it online for your job, someone can use that, or like your old classroom photos or something. I mean these might be a bit low quality and pixel-y, but yeah. 

are you going to be like tagged by friends, there's so many ways that your photo ends up online even though you didn't want it to. and of course someone can just snap one of you. I mean this will have, of course, have to be someone who's like more dedicated, but the reality is that like no one's 100 safe, and the women who are safer are decreasing their participation in public life. because let's be real, online is the Public Square. 

I started showing my face on YouTube because I figured more people will listen if they can see a real person. but I do figure that when women and girls collectively understand that this is a price they pay for being online, well I don't know how many will pull back, but some will. online world is already so misogynistic that women are underrepresented, and women of color even more so.

but this will get worse, or like the price paid is just so unfair, it's too high. some women girls are gonna like take their own lives or like gonna have to upend their whole lives because of deep fake porn. others are going to internalize the messages. they're going to internalize oh well everyone thinks I'm a [ expletive ], I'm a [ expletive ], I might as well start only fans, like they already have my nude images, like I already lost power over that. 

and they will feel this faux sense of agency if they enter the sex trade and now they're at least getting paid for the abuse. that's a very common story of how women in the digital age enter the sex trade. already, victims of revenge porn or all kinds of sexual trauma, of which revenge porn is one, are more likely to [join the sex] trade as sort of a traumatic coping mechanism. 

and when I tweeted about this, a woman told her story. this exact thing happened to her. someone shared revenge porn, and shortly after, she entered the sex industry because it yeah it takes away your Humanity. and of course, in a culture where we pretend that the sex trade isn't dehumanizing, like that's the thing that didn't come up in the city or much.

but the thing that I've been primarily concerned about, um and that this deep fake thing is slowly shifting, like I've always been most concerned about the women in the in the porn videos whose actual physical bodies are used. and now that I know a lot more about revenge porn and deep fake porn, I get more and more concerned about civilian women. 

I mean I've always been aware of porn spills out in how men [treat?] women, speak to them and sexual acts that proliferate. like this has already been concerning for a long time. and this is why every woman and girl deserves to talk about this even if none of that bad stuff ever happened to us or if we were never in the sex trade this is every woman and Girl's business like don't tell us to shut up about this. 

yeah I've always been most concerned with women in the trade, because [of] the trauma. the physical trauma on top of the psychological trauma, but like a lot of women say even if the physical trauma heals -- with some it doesn't, like there's plenty of porn survivors living with physical disabilities -- the mental consequences are really really bad. 

which is why I do not accept that the sex industry is some kind of like poverty catching net for women. I mean it's aside from the fact that the average woman and only fans make like a hundred bucks 150 bucks a month. and the average woman in the porn industry lasts like half a year and then the industry considers her used up. 

so no it doesn't fix female poverty. and this entire industry always has and will, now that it includes a lot of Civilian women against their will through deep fake porn, it will harm our chances in the job market. if someone looks up our name and they find hardcore porn, like I know that the 'sex work is work' crowds say that we will fix this, because if like... let's say your name's like Marie Taylor and the boss types Marie Taylor and finds hardcore porn -- they believe if they just shout "sex work is work" enough, the boss will think "oh so she was a sex worker. you go girl, um very confident. you know you should probably know a lot about marketing. I really respect that." 

you actually think you're gonna make men -- oh yeah I did assume a boss was male -- but I mean plenty of the hate against women's [equality??] comes from women. it's true -- not the like violent lethal type, or the I'll pimp you out type, usually, but certainly the Discrimination, like [in] the job market or Social Circles comes from women too. you think that boss of whatever sex is going to look at that material and just really respect her? the male boss is gonna like, if he hires her, probably like sexually harass her. 

like that's the reality. and this deep fake porn stuff will mean that this will happen again to like the Marie Taylor's of the world, like the very average women. not that any woman deserves it or that it's been okay up until now. I've been screaming from the rooftops since I was 18 about this stuff. 

that it's bad enough if it happens to a small subgroup of women, but deep fake porn is going to make the entire world any man's -- and a frightening number of boys' -- virtual brothel the entire world. they can put their teachers, their female relatives, the girl who rejected them, their ex-girlfriends, the the twitch streamers, these celebrities, the deceased historic women -- I mean, [ fucking ] hell someone's gonna make like Anne Frank deep fake porn. 

like let's be real, there's no end to the depravity. and the shield and sword that feminism should be, having been diluted by liberalism, is gonna be totally -- it's gonna be like total jiggly rubber. like it's gonna be not helpful, because this type of feminism just says "oh we will," just like I mentioned, "change your boss's mind. he'll think it's you as an empowered woman who knows about marketing, and not an object that has [ ??? ]." 

I mean [I saw] with my own eyes this [ expletive ] started when I was like 17, 18. girls around me thought it was quite normal to put like artistic nudes on their Instagram. I don't blame them for one second, they're 100 human beings of equal value to me. like I'm not better because I didn't do that. I remember this culture was so strong. I did some like body painting projects back then, almost posted one of them topless online because I thought I shouldn't be ashamed.

women shouldn't be ashamed, but the reality is they will be shamed. liberal feminism is not the main perpetrator. right, it is The Pimps and the banks and all the people who profited from this. the legislators who don't give a [ expletive ], the misogynists who, like now, any man can be his own pornographer, right. they have been for a long time. ever since the smartphone certainly, but now even more.

he doesn't even need a woman. he can be an incel locked in your room and feel like a king with a harem. porn already does that --makes men think they have a harem, but now even more so. you can pick individual women like, let's say from your high school, and put them in your digital harem. 

yeah this is where we're heading. only thing that you can do is not consume any porn. don't consume any porn. it's the only thing that you can do right now that helps. writing your legislator asking for a change in legislation is not completely futile if it fuels the conversation, and more and more people decide "you know I can't justify watching porn." 

I know that the documentaries against PornHub and xHamster did stop people from watching porn. like I know people who said "I saw that and I quit," including men, so it's not completely futile to have legislation in order to propel the conversation. and we're going to need services for victims, at least to get your psychological counseling to prevent some of the suicides that will happen and have happened. 

that's one thing you can do -- talk about this to your friends and family. make it clear to them. unless they want to live in a society where, again, any man's or boy's virtual brothel is filled with any woman or girl, they need to do something. we're slowly falling into that reality. liberal feminism, like girl boss feminism, is a blunt sword against that doesn't do anything.

I know some people will say "well what about the income of porn performers?" like that's going to drop if consumption drops of course. like consumption is not going to drop overnight, it's going to drop gradually, if it does it all of course. because I know more and more countries are getting access to the internet, and and more and more men and boys newly introduced to porn. though I know smartphones have been around and lots of you know developing countries for a long time.

the fight against deep fake porn has to go hand in hand with other fights against misogyny and female Poverty of course. like these all have to go together. you're not gonna put a woman in the sex trade on the street if you personally quit porn. let's be real like that's not how it works. people will tell you that by that logic, we'd all have to consume all kinds of [un]ethical things all of the time or like, people go hungry. by that logic, like we would all have to go and shop at h&m because otherwise like Indonesian seamstresses will all go hungry. they're currently going hungry because of starvation wages and like dying in fires and factories.

I know that individual consumption is not going to push it one way or another. this way, say the anti-deep fake porn movement, just like the anti-sex trade movement, has to link arms with anti-poverty, decolonization, all of these movements. and like I'm not under some illusion that we're heading towards a more and more Progressive society and all this stuff will definitely happen. progress is incredibly tenuous. 

I mean, can't even imagine what it's like for American women who lost their rights to abortion. and I know there's plenty of plenty of countries in the world where women never had those rights in the first place. or the last time they had it they lived in a matriarchal society, which would have been very long time ago. 

I know when you look at it you know from a global scale, it feels incredibly Bleak. all of this stuff all the porn and prostitution stuff feels very very Bleak. I understand that. like I I have like no guarantee that we'll win this fight, but we'll definitely lose if we never try.