Television host Maine Mendoza replied in shock to one of her 6.3 million Twitter followers, the woman in a porn video looked so much like her. Her management said she fell prey to a deepfake.
Cybercriminals harness AI and other powerful facial recognition tools to create deepfakes, which look and sound so much like the real person being faked, they easily go viral. Mendoza fits the most common target of deepfakes according to Sensitivity, an internet security firm that specializes on detecting it.
Of the nearly 15,000 deepfake videos online at the end of 2019, 96% are pornographic and all of the deepfake porn videos involve female celebrities. Even the non-porn deepfake videos almost exclusively target women, said Amsterdam-based Sensitivity, formerly called Deeptrace.
Mendoza said she was terrified at the resemblance between her and he woman in the video, to which her fans called her attention.
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"The speed of the developments surrounding deepfakes means this landscape is constantly shifting, with rapidly materializing threats resulting in increased scale and impact. It is essential that we are prepared to face these new challenges. Now is the time to act," Sensitivity said in its The State of Deepfakes report for 2019, the most recent one available on its website.
"The rise of synthetic media and deepfakes is forcing us towards an important and unsettling realization: our historical belief that video and audio are reliable records of reality is no longer tenable," said its CEO and chief scientist Giorgio Patrini.
Deepfakes are what Photoshop was to doctored paparazzi pictures in the late 1990s to the early 2000s. They feed voyeruism and the thirst for scandal and celebrity.
Sensitivity also warned about the growing threat of deepfakes to politics, citing recent deepfake videos of former U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Mendoza's management, All Access, warned that it would "not hesitate to take appropriate legal action" against those who circulate the video.
Earlier this year, former Miss Universe Catriona Gray filed a cyber crime complaint over doctored nude pictures that were passed off on social media as her.
As coronavirus quarantines keep people at home and constantly browsing the internet, Sensitivity said world leaders should act on deepfakes now. Beyond pornography, it could be used to target governments and businesses, it said.
"Deepfakes are here to stay, and their impact is already being felt on a global scale," it said.
