The streamer Atrioc recently made headlines for visiting a deepfake website that had explicit content of other streamers and internet personalities on it. This scandal has gone beyond just Atrioc with now a much larger conversation on deepfakes being had across social media. So, what's going on?
Not to worry, because in this article, we'll tell you everything you need to know about the Atrioc, Ludwig, and QTCinderella deepfake situation.
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Atrioc's Deepfake Scandal Explained
The long and short of it is that a streamer by the name of Atrioc, a popular streamer and friend of other big creators like Ludwig, accidentally leaked some of his browsing history by way of leaving a Chrome tab open during a stream.
The tab in question? A deepfake website where you could pay for access to explicit photos and videos of other popular streamers and influencers that don't make sexual content. Since then, Atrioc has issued a couple of formal apologies and swore it was a one-off thing that he won't ever do again.
Ultimately, the scandal when it comes to Atrioc more involves the fact he watched porn that involved colleagues and friends and was careless enough to broadcast this fact to the wider internet. However, the conversation is quickly turning into one about deepfakes themselves and whether or not deepfakes should be legal, if they're ethical, and overall, what should be done about deepfakes becoming more and more popular.
So, let's talk about deepfakes.
What Are Deepfakes?
Put simply, a deepfake is essentially a really advanced form of image/video editing and creation that appears to involve a certain person, usually a celebrity, that was created with the help of AI and/or machine learning tools.
If you're not too tech savvy, think of deepfakes like a really advanced Photoshop. Essentially, you can take a bunch of photos and videos of a person and use those to 'train' an algorithm to be able to generate new photos and videos of that person in whatever context or situation you can imagine.
On the internet, as you might expect, deepfakes are often sexual in nature. If you Google a celebrity's name + deepfake, you'll probably find a ton of explicit content where it looks very much like the celebrity in question that's all totally and completely 100% fake, as in it never happened in real life.
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In terms of legality, in almost all places, deepfakes are legal, and they're becoming more and more mainstream in part because of how advanced and accessible the tech used to create them is becoming. We're rapidly getting to a point where you can type into a text box a celebrity's name and what you want to see them doing and get that photo or video beamed right to you.
So, the question becomes, is this moral or ethical? Is it fair to use, for example, a popular woman's likeness to create porn from?
Deepfakes: The Case Against Them
Many out there argue against deepfakes, and the main thrust of this argument is pretty simple: creating explicit content involving someone who has not given their consent for that content to be created is simply wrong.
Take a figure like QTCinderella for example. She's a popular streamer in her own right known for organizing high-quality events involving other big streamers as well as her collaborations with her boyfriend, Ludwig. She does not make sexual content in any way or even post revealing images to her personal social media accounts.
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To her, someone taking her likeness, manipulating it, and creating sexual content out of it goes against everything she stands for and wants to be known for; furthermore, having strangers on the internet looking at her body in such a way and sexualizing it makes her deeply uncomfortable.
For sexual content to be created involving her without her consent she and many others consider to be simply unacceptable and bordering on harassment. After all, few would support someone recording someone without permission and using that footage to create sexual content with.
This perspective, in general, has led many to call for legislation around deepfakes in order to limit what can be published and distributed without the knowledge or consent of whoever's likeness is being used.
However, there is another perspective on deepfakes out there, too.
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Deepfakes: The Case For Them
The case for deepfakes is a bit more complicated than the case against them, but let's dive straight into it, shall we?
So, you probably know that if you're a celebrity, all kinds of content involving you is inevitably going to be created, whether it's news articles, fan art, fan fiction, or a billion other things. The question becomes: how are deepfakes different from elaborate Photoshops or fan fiction or fan art that can be (and often is) sexual in nature?
For many, there isn't much of a difference there except that there's a growing movement to restrict deepfakes and not much of one to do the same with fan art or fan fiction, even the grossly sexual pieces of art or fiction fans come up with. In general, some take issue with the focus on deepfakes, arguing that people aren't actually upset by deepfakes but rather by the idea that others could mistake the deepfake for something that's actually real.
There's no doubt that the sharing of explicitly sexual content made using someone's likeness who doesn't want their likeness used like that can make people uncomfortable, and it almost certainly encourages harassment and objectification of women in particular; however, it's a lot more difficult to say that's the fault of the deepfake itself rather than folks viewing one.
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If we all lived in a world where explicit content online was just a normal part of life that didn't ever, really, get talked about or raised any eyebrows, would the existence of deepfakes, be they sexual or otherwise, really matter? Assuming, of course, you were to able to find out what was real and what wasn't.
For those on the other side of the argument, their answer to that question is no, and they come down on the side of advocating for people to be less creepy and weird when it comes to making of sexual content rather than focusing on pushing for the content itself to be restricted or censored.
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