Over the past three years, celebrities have been appearing across social media in improbable scenarios. You may have recently caught a grinning Tom Cruise doing magic tricks with a coin or Nicolas Cage appearing as Lois Lane in
Man of Steel. Most of us now recognize these clips as deepfakes startlingly realistic videos created using artificial intelligence. In 2017, they began circulating on message boards like Reddit as altered videos from anonymous users; the term is a portmanteau of “deep learning” the process used to train an algorithm to doctor a scene and “fake.” Deepfakes once required working knowledge of AI-enabled technology, but today, anyone can make their own using free software like FakeApp or Faceswap. All it takes is some sample footage and a large data set of photos (one reason celebrities are targeted is the easy availability of high-quality facial images) and the app can convincingly swap out one person’s face for another’s.
March 05, 2021 1:59 AMLegal
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CYBERSPACE On the heels of International Sex Workers’ Rights Day on March 4, a conference next month aims to further the mission of decriminalizing sex work, providing mutual aid to sex work communities, and ending the stigma around the sex industry.
Informal, Criminalized, Precarious: Sex Workers Organizing Against Barriers is a webinar series that will run daily between April 3 and April 17. Described by organizer and veteran adult performer Lorelei Lee as “organized by and for sex workers,” the conference s daily panels will cover topics including Sex Work as Work and Sex Work as Anti-Work, Sexual Gentrification: An Internet Sex Workers Built and Sex Work and Migration.
Jah Bella lost work during the pandemic and says OnlyFans has changed her life – she is making money and has ‘a lot more freedom to live life’. Photograph: Jah Bella
This time last year Jah Bella was doing it tough. She had fled an abusive relationship, was looking after her newborn daughter and was struggling to find work in far north Queensland.
“Every single regular job that I had, I was getting sexually harassed in some way,” she says. “I would either get fired or I’d have to leave once I reported it.”
When the pandemic hit all remaining gigs dried up.