DeepNude app that undresses photos of women has been taken offline
Friday 28 June 2019 3:28pm
An app that 'undresses' women to create deep fake pornographic images became so popular that it crashed the download server and was eventually pulled by its creator, saying "the world is not yet ready".
DeepNude, created by an anonymous programmer who goes by the alias 'Alberto', superimposed a nude female body onto an uploaded photo, using a machine-learning algorithm.
"We created this project for user's [sic] entertainment a few months ago," the app's Twitter account tweeted on Friday morning.
"We thought we were selling a few sales every month in a controlled manner. We never never thought it would become viral."
"If 500,000 people use it, the probability that people mis-use it will be high."
The app has been on sale for months, while a Windows and Linux product was launched on Sunday. A free version would place a large watermark across the images noting that they were fake, while a US$50 version placed a smaller watermark in a corner, where it could be cropped out.
It came to public attention on Thursday,
after a story byMotherboard.
This triggered a heap of interest and crashed the site.
The software can no longer be downloaded from the original website, which is down, and those who already have it say it no longer works.
But pirated versions may still be available to download from other sources.
DeepNude has tweeted: "Surely some copies of DeepNude will be shared on the web, but we don't want to be the ones who sell it."
Is this illegal?
Placing a person's face onto a nude body and then showing this to others is image-based abuse.
Since May last year, it's been illegal in New South Wales - punishable by up to three years jail and an $11,000 fine. South Australia, the ACT and WA have followed suit, while in Victoria it could come under the criminal offence of image-based sexual abuse.
Many jurisdictions also have laws that ban the use of a carrier service to menace or harass, which can be used to prosecute cases of revenge porn.
In August last year, the Commonwealth passed federal revenge porn legislation, introducing civil penalties of up to $105,000 for individuals and up to $525,000 for corporations if they do not remove an image when requested to by the eSafety Commissioner.
However, despite these laws, Australian victims of image-based abuse have
struggled to get overseas offenders to take their photos offline.
This makes the spectre of simple-to-make 'deep nudes' even more scary.
Deep fake technology is improving rapidly, allowing everyday users to deploy the type of high-tech computer fakery we see in the movies.
In December 2017, a Reddit user was outed using AI to swap the faces of actors in porn videos with the faces of well-known celebrities.
It's been stopped for now, but DeepNude is a sign of what's to come.