Technology can be a blessing and curse as they say! A great slave yet a disastrous master. That’s what exactly happening worldwide especially with the recent ‘fun’ application that make deepfake videos. The advertisements have been going viral on the internet, where with help of AI, users can swap faces with anyone in a video. And to promote the same, the makers decided to use popular celebs’ faces in the advertisements, where we can see Emma Watson, Scarlett Johansson and other stars in s*xually suggestive instances. Which is problematic and disturbing at the same time especially for the youth.
However, thankfully, the social media platforms Facebook and Instagram have decided to take actions against the app and therefore have also taken down the advertisements from their application, after receiving repetitive complaints.
Facebook and Instagram, both owned by Mark Zuckerberg, shuffled to take down large numbers of video clips publicising a software that creates deepfake videos using AI that feature Hollywood actors in suggestive poses.
One social media advertisement features a deep fake of “Harry Potter” heroine Emma Watson crouching to the floor and gazing lusciously into the camera before it would seem she will shortly engage in s*x act. The title of the software, FaceMega, which promotes itself as a tool for producing “deepfake face swap videos,” is then showcased in the advertisement.
According to NBC News, FaceMega used deepfake videos featuring the replicas of Watson and “Avengers” star Scarlett Johansson to allocate more than 230 online ads on Meta’s social networking sites.
The term “Deepfake” refers to a video in which a person’s face has been digitised transformed with the assistance of artificial intelligence so that they imitate somebody else, most oftenly a famous person or well-known person.
A student who studies Journalism in Tennessee named Lauren Barton discovered the problematic ad campaigns. On Monday, she uploaded the Watson deepfake video clip to her Twitter feed.
