Hundreds of Emma Watson sexual deepfakes on Facebook

Unfortunately, we have spoken and will continue to do so the other side of the coin that has the new technology powered by artificial intelligence. Deepfakes are undoubtedly one of them, and an example we have it this week with the appearance of hundreds of fake videos with the face of Emma Watson or Scarlett Johansson.

All of these sequences of sexual content appeared on Facebook and Instagram as part of an apparent ad campaign for a deepfake app under the name FaceMega. Apparently, it was several Facebook, Instagram and Messenger users who found these app ads and sounded the alarm.

What could be seen “advertised” in Facemega was the face of the actresses Emma Watson orScarlett Johansson in a sexually suggestive video. When we talk about the face of both we talk about a more than palpable resemblance difficult to differentiate from a real imageall of this, of course, without your consent and achieved with just a few taps.

And as we said, in the background, and possibly the most incomprehensible of all, is that it was an orchestrated campaign, as these ads were part of FaceMega, where for $8 a week, users can swap someone’s faces in a video with photos uploaded to the app.

Right now, FaceMega appears to have been removed or removed from the Apple app store, but it’s still available. on Google Play Store. He said to NBC News Lauren Barton, who uploaded a screen recording of one of the videos to Twitter:

This could be used with high school students in public schools who are bullied. It could ruin someone’s life. They could get into trouble at work. And this is extremely easy to do and free. All I had to do was upload a photo of my face and I had access to 50 free templates.

Interestingly, or perhaps not so much, the app’s own ads seem to go against the app’s own terms and conditions, which say that users may not “act deceptively or impersonate another person or organization.”

For his part, Meta told Gizmodo in an email that “our policies prohibit adult content, regardless of whether it is AI-generated or not, and we have restricted this page from advertising on our platform.” By the way, the campaign comes from app developer Ufoto Limited, owned by Wondershare, its Chinese parent company.